


All the Useless Things -- Wilgefortis, year 3

by tin_girl



Series: All The Useless Things [3]
Category: Original Work
Genre: (still only sort of), Art Theft, Boarding School, Dark Academia, F/F, F/M, M/M, Shenanigans, and i think it shows, i am actually not a huge fun of shakespeare's comedies, pining and yearning and all that jazz, who else is going insane because of that destiel mess
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-18
Updated: 2020-12-30
Packaged: 2021-03-09 21:49:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 9
Words: 26,093
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27622954
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tin_girl/pseuds/tin_girl
Summary: He thought about it a lot later – houses and homes, and how maybe there should be a word for something in between the two, not that he’d ever use it.(How come, he thought, houses are boxes? How come, he thought, houses are not escape routes?)
Relationships: Original Male Character/Original Male Character
Series: All The Useless Things [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1790320
Comments: 123
Kudos: 36





	1. the home of the house, september-october 2000

**Author's Note:**

> Hello everyone, please read the warnings below! 
> 
> **So, some content warnings for part 3 & part 4 BOTH: **
> 
> **underage smoking and alcohol consumption, severe bullying, extremely unhealthy coping mechanisms, some self harm (although not of the traditionally understood sort), character death (not any of the main characters). If any of these are triggering for you, please don't hesitate to contact me (@yoyointhegarden on tumblr and twitter, and I don't mind putting my email here if someone would prefer that) for details since I'm not planning to include the warnings before specific chapters so as not to spoil certain events.**
> 
> Anyway, this chapter is........... a bit chaotic, but I tried :') Year 3 is a bit hard because it's a transitory one and I don't want to linger on it, so we'll kind of speed through it. It also has the least plot-relevant events as it's, kind of, the calm before the storm. 
> 
> There's a lot of talk about two Paris museums here, sorry in advance. Also, David Hockney has painted too many roads for me to be able to choose just one, so let's just agree that the one I put here is, like, actually all of them because they all sort of make me want to cry in an almost good way. 
> 
> Can you believe that these kids are already fifteen, yeah, me neither..........

David Hockney, _Road Across The Wolds_

*

I look

at you and I would rather look at you than all the portraits in the

world

except possibly for the _Polish Rider_ occasionally and anyway it’s

in the Frick

which thank heavens you haven’t gone to yet so we can go

together for the first time

~Frank O’Hara, _Having a Coke With You_

*

Aubrey is going back to school, and everything is fine. He wouldn’t let his mother drive him to London, and everything is fine. He stepped away before she could adjust his collar for him in the morning because his collar didn’t need adjusting, and _everything is fine_.

He spots Easy on the platform right away, newsboy cap askew on his head and a threadbare bag in hand, and everything is _not_ fine. Instead of approaching him, Aubrey leans on a pillar and stares.

 _Artists aren’t supposed to be beautiful_ , December Graham told them in class once. _Think de Toulouse-Lautrec, think Picasso._

Aubrey spent the past few weeks imagining the sort of life him and his mother could carve themselves out of whatever ruin would await them if she left Aubrey’s father, and no matter what monstrous things he’d think up lying awake in his bed and staring at the ceiling, he just couldn’t convince himself that they were better off as they were. Seeing Easy on that platform, his hands shoved deep in his pockets and his lower lip half-scowl half-pout, he feels doubt for the first time.

He shakes out of it. Easy is great. The others are great. It won’t last.

(He hopes, naively, that if he keeps telling himself that, the universe will make sure it _will_ last just to prove him wrong.)

Aubrey doesn’t move. He’s waiting for Easy to notice him, but maybe Easy won’t – maybe Aubrey doesn’t exist all over again.

Soon, the crowd of teenagers thickens and he loses sight of Easy. He glimpses Kipp some distance away, and he sees Lavinia, too, but he doesn’t call out their names. Once the train pulls in, he waits until most of the kids have gotten on before dragging his suitcase to one of the cars.

It doesn’t take Aubrey long to locate the compartment Easy has chosen for them, and he’s even the first one there. Easy turns around when Aubrey slides the door open, and his eyes widen.

He stares, and it’s strange. He stares, and no one’s ever looked at Aubrey like this before – like they’ve been waiting to look at him, like their eyes were restless before and aren’t anymore, now that he’s here.

“What is it?” he asks, because it’s too much, he can’t stand it. He might be used to scrutiny, but that doesn’t mean he _likes_ it.

Easy tilts his head and keeps staring, eyebrows drawn low in a frown now.

“Easy?”

“Nothing. What? Nothing. Jesus. _Nothing_. Go away.”

Before Aubrey can decide if he means it literally, Easy steps past him and leaves, walking down the corridor with a dazed expression. Aubrey shrugs to convince himself it’s not important, and gets inside the compartment to place both his and Easy’s luggage up on the shelf.

“Where is he?” says Bessie Lawrence, glancing in with her feet firmly planted outside the compartment. “Also hello.”

“Hello, hello,” Aubrey says, nodding at her. “Went somewhere, seemed angry.”

“You seem something, too,” Bessie says, watching him with unblinking eyes.

“Angry?”

“ _Something_ ,” she insists. “Off.”

“It’s the weather,” Aubrey says smoothly, even though the weather is the usual windy-cloudy business. “Are you travelling with us today?”

Bessie shuffles her feet. “Am I?”

Aubrey smiles. “Get in.”

She passes him her bag when he reaches for it, and settles in the middle of the left-hand seat.

“Any plans for this year?” Aubrey prods before silence can swell like dough.

“I decided I’m not going to be bullied this year, but I’m not sure how to achieve that goal just yet,” Bessie tells him in a monotone voice, swinging her legs. “I’m going to collect chestnuts and read books on killer whales, too.”

“Of course,” Aubrey says, amused.

“What about you?”

“I’d just like to get through the year in one piece, to be honest.”

“Ha!” Jerusalem exclaims, appearing in the doorway like something conjured. “You wish!”

Aubrey squints at her.

“Why is your hair shorter on one side?”

“I got gum stuck in it, so I cut it off,” Jerusalem says, waving her hand dismissively. “Asymmetry is in, haven’t you heard?”

“You could just cut it _all_ off,” Bessie points out.

“Oh, I couldn’t!” Jerusalem says cheerfully, dropping her bags in Aubrey’s arms one by one. “I like when people have nightmares about my hair coming alive and strangling them like the kraken.”

“ _Oooh_ ,” Bessie breathes, mouth an o. “I like that, too.”

Aubrey rolls his eyes. “I’m not your porter, you know.”

It’s _easy_. It’s so easy, after the summer he’s had.

Jerusalem pats him on the head. “Sure you are, AA. Anyway, where’s everyone?”

“Move, move,” Kipp says from behind her, raising his leg and pressing the sole of his shoe to the small of her back. “Is it all of us this year?”

“Seems like it,” Quickly mumbles from the corridor. “I want the window seat.”

“No, you don’t,” Kipp says. “You could fall out, and then what?”

“I’m not _that_ paranoid, Kipp.”

“You kind of are,” Jerusalem smiles. “Where’s Reggie?”

“I don’t know, but I’ve seen Treasure,” Kipp says, nudging Quickly with an elbow.

“You have?” Quickly says distractedly, glancing left and right. “Where?”

“She looked awful, so don’t bother looking for her,” Kipp tells him. “Like she hasn’t slept in a week.”

“That sounds like a good reason to look for her,” Quickly sighs. “I have herbs.”

“You _always_ have herbs.”

“Yes,” Quickly nods. “I like to think it’s one of my better qualities.”

He leaves, presumably to look for Treasure, after having unceremoniously dumped his suitcase at Aubrey’s feet.

“Shsh,” Jerusalem says, placing her hand on his shoulder. “We’ll tip you.”

By the time the train leaves the station, Regina and Easy still God-knows-where, Quickly still busy distributing herbs somewhere, they’re all settled down, and Kipp and Jerusalem are already playing poker.

“At least it’s not _strip_ poker,” Jerusalem says when Aubrey shakes his head at them.

“It could be,” Kipp says, wriggling his eyebrows. “Hey, Easy, wanna strip for us?”

When Aubrey looks up, there’s a carboard cup full of steaming tea hovering two inches from his face.

“For me?” He wraps his hands around it, careful not to let his and Easy’s fingers brush. Even though it wouldn’t be anything _bad_ if they did brush. Even though it maybe says more that he won’t let them brush than it would if he _did_.

(it became a sort of indulgence over the summer, worrying at that bitemark at the base of his thumb, and Aubrey tried quitting it but it was the one habit he just couldn’t shake.)

“No, I’m only holding it under your nose so you’ll spit in it before I give it to Kipp,” Easy says, rolling his eyes. “Move.”

He settles down between Aubrey and Bessie, mumbling something quietly to the latter.

“Missed you, too, darling,” Kipp says, making kissing noises at him. “How was the orphanage?”

“Are you _not_ going to strip?” Jerusalem complains, frowning at Easy. “I want to see if you’re hiding a third arm somewhere.”

Ordinarily, it’d be enough to provoke Easy into pulling his shirt off, but he stays still, so maybe it’s not an ‘ordinarily’ so much as a ‘once.’

“If someone had three arms,” Kipp says, thoughtful, “would they have three armpits?”

“If someone had three arms,” Bessie tells him, “that’d be the least of their problems.”

“Hello,” Regina says, appearing in the doorway. “How are you all?”

“Where have you been?” Jerusalem whines. “Without you, there’s no one I could use for a pillow here.”

Kipp pats his lap, but Jerusalem only glares at him.

“Like I trust you!”

“I’m sharing a compartment with Treasure,” Regina explains. “I just came to say hi.”

“You’re yet to say it,” Bessie says, smiling up at her. “You said ‘hello.’”

“They’re synonymous,” Aubrey says before he can bite his tongue.

“Yes, I’m pretty sure Bess knows that,” Easy sighs, only he sounds fondly exasperated rather than mad, so Aubrey doesn’t die of mortification. Too much.

“No, it’s fine,” Bessie says. “I was being rude.”

“Were you?” Regina smiles. “Hi.”

Bessie returns the smile. “Hi.”

“Is Quickly there?” Kipp asks.

“In our compartment? Yeah, he’s… Treasure’s a little down, and he’s telling her bad knock-knock jokes.”

“Oh _Jesus_.”

“No, I think it’s actually working.”

“I have a feeling they’re going to name their children Charles and Philomena,” Jerusalem says, mouth curled in distaste.

Kipp’s eyes widen in horror. “Oh, no. Let’s castrate them.”

“Anyway, see you at school,” Regina says, wriggling her fingers in a small wave, and then she’s off. 

For a while, Kipp and Jerusalem play poker without disturbing the rest of them, and Aubrey is free to stare out the window as Easy asks Bessie question after question, stealing glances at Aubrey every now and then. Aubrey squints at his reflection in the dirty mirror, trying to see if there’s something on his face.

“It’s just that Ezra has missed you,” Kipp says at one point, like he’s caught him at it, like he _knows_.

“Hey, Kipp?” Easy says.

Kipp grins. “Yes?”

“That’s a nice nose you’ve got there.”

“Why, thank you! I got it from my mother.”

“Shame if something happened to it.”

Kipp laughs. “Are you _threatening_ me?”

Easy studies his nails. “Threatening you? No way.”

“Are you mafia now?” Jerusalem asks, squinting at him. “You smell like back alleys and death.”

He doesn’t. He smells like sweat and soap. Aubrey would know, he’s sitting right next to him.

“You’re more boring than the Bible,” Easy tells Jerusalem.

“You’ve read the Bible?”

Easy smiles wryly. “I was _bored_.”

“Take a nap,” Bessie says, tugging on his sleeve. “You look tired.”

“I am tired,” Easy says, pointing a finger at Jerusalem and Kipp. “Of _them_.”

That said, he does turn sideways, settling down with his head in Aubrey’s lap and his legs flung over Bessie’s.

“Alright,” Aubrey says, and only realises he’s holding his arms raised over Easy when Kipp shoots him a look. He drops them to his sides and tries to breathe like someone who has touched a human being in the past few weeks. “Alright.”

“If I wake up with a penis drawn on my face, you will not live to see tomorrow,” Easy threatens, eyes already closed. Ten minutes later, he’s out. Twenty minutes later, despite Bessie’s valiant efforts to the contrary, there is, indeed, a penis on his face. Half an hour later, he mumbles something in his sleep and buries his face in Aubrey’s thigh.

“You inhale first, and exhale after,” Kipp advises Aubrey in a sing-song voice. Aubrey would throw his pencil at him, only then he wouldn’t _have_ a pencil, and so he decides it’s not worth it.

*

“ _Much Ado About Nothing_ ,” Teddy Willow tells them during the first theatre meeting. “That’s my final word.”

“Can’t we do _Julius Caesar_ instead?” Easy groans.

“Third-years do comedies,” Teddy reminds him.

Easy blinks at him.

“What’s not clicking?” Teddy sighs, impatient.

“He was stabbed twenty-three times,” Easy says with a shrug. “That’s pretty funny.”

Teddy groans. “We’ll do Caesar next year, how about that?”

Easy stares.

“What’s wrong with _Much Ado About Nothing_?” Teddy demands, exasperated.

“It’s about nothing,” Easy says, deadpan. “Everyone in it is an idiot.”

Teddy waves a hand. “Don’t worry, I’ve already decided that Kipp will play Benedick.”

“He definitely puts the ‘dick’ in it,” Easy says with an absent nod. Teddy makes a strangled noise.

“I like how ambiguous the ‘it’ is here,” Kipp says, amused. “I sincerely hope everyone in the room is imagining horrible things.”

“ _I_ am,” Bessie sighs. “Sometimes, killer whales eat deer. It’s beautiful, but horrifying.”

“Sorry, who are you?” Teddy demands, squinting down at her.

Easy groans. “You know her, you bastard.”

“I’m friends with your brother,” Bessie explains patiently. “We exchange letters.”

“Do you, now,” Teddy says, clearly doubtful.

Bessie quirks an eyebrow at him. “Do you have a problem with that? You a racist, or something?”

Teddy sputters. “I am— _not_. It’s just Lindsay is— my – he’s—”

Bessie gives him a pitying look and then pats him on the shoulder. “There, there. Don’t choke.”

“If I’m playing Benedick,” Kipp says, drawing out the vowels, “Then who’s playing the idiot who humiliates his girlfriend because he was tricked into thinking she’d cheated on him?”

Teddy’s eyes jump to Easy.

“Oh, screw you, no, I’m not!” Easy complains.

“It’s either that, or playing the bad guy.”

Easy arches an eyebrow. “Isn’t Claudio the bad guy?”

“He’s confused.”

“He’s _terrible_.”

“I’m with Teddy on this one,” Aubrey says, rubbing his neck and refusing to cower when Easy glares at him. “There’s the question of the times—”

“Well, if everyone was a sexist bastard back then, then I might as well play the most sexist bastard of them all!” Easy says, throwing his arms up.

“Don John, then,” Teddy mutters, noting it down. “Are you sure? You’d make a lovely Beatrice.”

*

“Summer was…” Easy says when Aubrey dares ask. “Summer… was.”

“Alright.”

“Did you know that time is like gum?”

“Sorry?”

“Forget it.”

*

“He’s a terrible Don John,” Teddy sighs, one week into the rehearsals.

Aubrey hums.

“No, I mean, he’s _great_. _Obviously._ It’s just, we need to de-prettify him or something.”

Aubrey hums again, and Teddy sighs, snapping his fingers. “Words, Allen. I need words.”

“Screwdriver. Impotence. Defenestration.”

“You’re just getting cheekier and cheekier every day, huh?”

Aubrey sighs. “How exactly do you imagine ‘de-prettifying’ him?”

“I don’t,” Teddy groans. “That’s the fucking problem.”

And it _is_ a problem. In the middle of the room, between pushed-aside desks, Easy is not exactly _pretty_ , but he’s _something_. He’s never been conventionally attractive, but he’s never been easy to look away from either, and he might be good at playing vile, but he just doesn’t look it.

“I mean, it’s fine, it’s not _Disney_ ,” Teddy mutters. “Not every bad guy has to be _ugly_.”

“It’s theatre,” Aubrey points out, refusing to make it easy for him. That’s not what he’s here for, after all.

“Maybe I could pay someone to beat him up before the play?”

Aubrey smiles. “Sure, Teddy. Like that’d help any.”

Aubrey can imagine it: Easy with a black eye, the white a craquelure of veins, the skin underneath a deep purple, and he finds it ironic, how cruel things aren’t always ugly, not at all.

“He’s too small, too,” Teddy complains. “Is he drinking milk?”

Aubrey shakes his head, and doesn’t voice what he’s thinking: that, small or not, Easy has grown.

*

He and Easy don’t spend the nights at the library this year. It’s not like that anymore. Aubrey still loves _Dora Maar au Chat_ more than is reasonable, but it’s just not like that anymore.

“What’s going on with you?” Easy demands one day when Aubrey crosses the library without so much as glancing at the painting.

“I can’t afford to do this right now,” Aubrey explains. “Priorities.”

“What is it you’re prioritising then?” Easy says, scowling at him. He’s quieter than ever and the scowl is what remains. The rest is changed: his limbs longer, his hair both more and less messy, his gestures almost spare compared to how he used to be: like the sort of hurricane people wait out in their cellars.

“Essays,” Aubrey says, pulling books off shelves. “They don’t let in just anyone in Oxbridge.”

“Of course they don’t,” Easy snorts, rolling his eyes. “I hear they’re fond of choir boys.”

Aubrey arches an eyebrow. “It’s not all privilege and nepotism, you know. You have to be smart, too.”

“I know that you have to be smart,” Easy says, glowering. “It’s just that being smart is hardly ever enough.”

“Hardly ever?”

“What, you disagree?”

“As a matter of fact, I do.”

“Oh?”

“I’d say it’s a ‘never.’”

“Ah.”

*

Aubrey doesn’t call his mother, and she can’t exactly call _him_.

He tells himself that he’s just not in the mood. He tells himself he’s simply too busy. He tells himself he’s not punishing her.

He’s not stupid enough to believe himself.

*

“I thought we weren’t doing this anymore?” Aubrey says carefully when Lavinia drops a stack of books on top of his notes and pulls a chair up to his library table.

“I don’t hate _you_ ,” she snaps, adjusting her glasses.

Aubrey leaves her be and studies his notes for ten minutes before he cracks.

“You don’t hate Regina either,” he says. He thinks that it’s a bit excessive when Lavinia silently collects her things and leaves for a different table, but what does he know?

*

December Graham sits atop a desk in a green dress with birds in flight printed all over the skirt, and talks to them about the Musée Rodin.

She starts like this:

“What makes a home a home?”

It seems rhetorical, only then she points her pen at Easy.

Easy leans back in his chair and sends her a challenging look. “I’m sure I wouldn’t know.”

She smiles. “Try again.”

He scowls. “I _don’t_ know.”

Her smile widens. “Do better.”

“I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know,” Easy mumbles, staring at the ceiling as others stare at him. “It doesn’t make sense that people say ‘I’m going home’ instead of saying ‘I’m going house,’ and it doesn’t make sense that people say ‘homeless’ and not ‘houseless.’ F— Bloody English.”

December arches an eyebrow. “So if you were to draw a home, you wouldn’t draw a house?”

Easy smiles. “I have better things to draw than homes.”

“Aubrey?” December says, without looking away from Easy, like it’s revenge.

Aubrey clears his throat. “Home is something that either was a house once, or wasn’t.”

December clicks her tongue. “Evasive.”

Aubrey stares at her until she lets it go.

“It’s a little awkward,” December says, spreading her hands, “when a house is not a home.”

“ _Profound_ ,” Easy mutters, and she catches it, and she adores him, and she smiles, and other kids hate him for it, and it’s all over them, and, and, and.

“If someone breaks his nose after this, I’m not spending the afternoon holding frozen peas to his face,” Kipp whispers in Aubrey’s ear.

“Where would you even get frozen peas?”

“The museum was a mansion first, and a boarding school later,” December goes on. “Rodin’s workshop, after that.”

“People lived there, and then they didn’t,” Kipp says, chin propped on his hand, and as December graces him with a smile, Aubrey remembers that secret Kipp trusted him with.

“It wasn’t build to be a museum, and you can tell,” December says. “You feel clumsy there, moving between the sculptures. They tell you to keep your bag close so you won’t knock into anyone, and when it gets crowded, it gets _crowded_.”

“It’s jarringly intimate,” Kipp says with a grin, legs stretched in front of his desk. “Like a monstrance in somebody’s living room.”

“You get it,” December says, delighted. She points a gloved finger – gloves again? – at Kipp, and smiled at Easy, like a little kid. “He gets it.”

Easy glares at her, and then goes back to sketching something on the inside of his notebook cover. From where Aubrey’s sitting, it looks suspiciously like a portrait of Joseph Stalin. It’s the moustache.

“It’s how you could be eating sandwiches there, where Rodin’s _Le Christ et la Madeleine_ is on display.”

“ _Le Christ et la Madeleine_?” Easy says, unimpressed. His French accent is pretty good considering that, as far as Aubrey knows, he doesn’t speak a word of the language. “ _Really_?”

“One of my favourites,” December says with a fond smile. “It’s how she’s wrapped around him.”

“Lovely,” Easy snorts.

“It _is_ ,” she insists. “He’s contorted because he’s crucified. _She_ ’s contorted _because he’s crucified_.”

“I don’t get it,” Jerusalem says. “She should just date Judas instead, or something.”

“I want that on a t-shirt, actually,” Kipp laughs.

“This is why everyone hates you guys,” Lavinia whispers from behind Aubrey. “It’s supposed to be a class, and not your private tea party.”

“Anyway, I prefer _Sleep_ ,” December decides, tilting her head. “It’s so imperfect that it’s as perfect as it gets.”

When Aubrey turns his head, he catches Easy staring straight at him.

*

“What _would_ you draw if you were to draw a home?” Aubrey never asks Easy, not once.

*

“I suppose the Musée de l'Orangerie is the opposite,” Aubrey muses later as he and Treasure crowd together under her blanket up on the roof. They’re not touching, an inch of space between their shoulders, but it feels like they are, sharing warmth like this.

“Is it?” she smiles. “How so?”

“There would be no intimacy there,” Aubrey says. “It’s just white walls and _Water Lilies_.”

Of course, there’s nothing ‘just’ about Monet’s _Water Lilies_ , but.

“Is there no intimacy in nakedness, then?”

“I don’t know, is there?” Aubrey hums. “It’s almost shameless.”

“I think it’s just a different kind of intimacy,” Treasure says, nudging him with an elbow. “The scary kind.”

“Scary?”

“Well, yes. I mean, when you go to Rodin’s, it’s sculptures all over the places, room after room. When you go to the Orangerie – and I would love to go, one day – I imagine you have to decide that it’s worth it first, bothering just for those _Water Lilies_.”

“I see what you mean.”

“You don’t just see what I mean,” she laughs. “You agree with me.”

Treasure, weeks into the new school year, doesn’t look ‘off’ anymore. Gone are the dark shadows under her eyes, and gone is the scabbed line on her lower lip. When she smiles, Aubrey forgets all about how she looked when she got off the train in Bullford, like a ghost in the middle of disappearing, and wanting to go, too.

“You’d rather visit Rodin’s?” Aubrey prods.

“For me, it’s not about which museum I’d rather visit,” she says, with a somewhat self-deprecating smile. “For me, it’s about whether I’d rather visit it with someone, or alone.”

“Hmm.”

“Aren’t you going to ask me which it is?”

Aubrey smiles. “I got the impression you haven’t decided yet.”

Slowly, slowly, Treasure tilts her head until her forehead is resting against his shoulder.

“This, here, is why I like you,” she says into the sleeve of his shirt.

*

When Aubrey wakes with his cheek pressed to an open textbook, Easy is watching him. He’s sitting on the opposite end of the library table, chin in hand, and Aubrey tries to remember if he was there before.

It’s odd, the staring. Easy is frowning, like Aubrey is an aggravating math problem, and when Aubrey blinks awake, he doesn’t look away.

“What is it?” Aubrey questions, rubbing at his nose.

“I’m trying to figure it out,” Easy says distractedly.

“Trying to figure _what_ out?”

“ _It._ _Some_ thing. I don’t _know_. _God_.”

“Okay, alright,” Aubrey says, taken aback. “It’s just that—”

“Did you even sleep in summer?” Easy demands irritably. “Like, at all?”

“What?”

“Oh, never mind,” Easy says, throwing his hands up. “I need to go draw something normal like parachutes or pigeons, or I’ll go _insane_.”

He leaves without his book, and Aubrey closes it for him. It’s _Wuthering Heights_.

 _Wuthering Heights_ , which is all, _If all else perished, and he remained, I should still continue to be; and if all else remained, and he were annihilated, the universe would turn to a mighty stranger._

 _Wuthering Heights_ , which is all, _Be with me always - take any form - drive me mad! only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you!_

 _Wuthering Heights_ , which is also all, _I have not broken your heart - you have broken it; and in breaking it, you have broken mine._

How strange that somebody should feel all that, when Aubrey’s existence is just essay marks, and not calling his mother, and only checking up on _Dora Maar au Chat_ once a day.

How strange that somebody should feel all that, when Aubrey’s slowly forgetting how to feel anything at all.

*

They find the bike after they sneak out again, hop over the wall where the trees are thickest.

“Quick, quick!” Jerusalem says. “Before summer ends!”

“It’s October, idiot,” Kipp tells her, amused. “It’s already ended.”

“No, no, we can catch up with it yet!” Jerusalem insists. “Look how yellow everything is!”

“Isn’t yellow autumn?” Regina says, looking around as they walk down the side of the road.

“Yellow is both,” Kipp laughs. “Summer and autumn, divorced with shared custody of the colour.”

“Yellow is winter, too, when dogs pee on snow,” Easy says, unimpressed.

“Don’t ever eat it,” Quickly says with a shudder.

“Why the hell would I _eat_ it?”

“I would!” Jerusalem says cheerfully. “If someone dared me to, I mean.”

“ _Jesus_.”

“Hey, look,” Quickly says, pointing a finger. “What’s that?”

There, in the weeds at the side of the road, is an overturned, rusty bike.

“I want, I want, _I want_ ,” Jerusalem chants, delighted.

“It’s just a bike,” Easy sighs, nudging it with his foot. “It’s ugly as fuck.”

“You are, too, and I’m friends with you anyway,” Jerusalem says, crouching next to the thing. “It has a _basket_. It’s _cute_.”

“Don’t you have one at home?” Easy sighs.

“Sure I do, but I’m not at home now, am I? Don’t _you_ miss riding a bike?”

Aubrey rubs his temple with his hand, already knowing what the flush spreading over the bridge of Easy’s nose means.

“Oh, don’t tell me!” says Kipp with wide eyes. “Oh, _really_?”

Jerusalem looks between the two of them with a frown. “What, what?”

“Oh, I’m enjoying this so much,” Kipp says, trying to hide his grin behind his hand. “Oh, Easy.”

“Are you done now?” Easy groans, bright red by now.

“ _Done_?” Jerusalem echoes. “We’re not done! We’re not even started, because _what’s going on_?”

Regina only sighs, busy rubbing Easy’s shoulders.

“I’m guessing he doesn’t know how to ride a bike, Jerry,” Quickly mumbles with an apologetic smile sent Easy’s way. “Kipp’s being awful about it.”

“I’m being decent about it!” Kipp protests, scandalised. “Just wait till Jerry demands we—”

“Teach you!” Jerusalem exclaims, eyes dancing. “We should teach you.”

“Oh no,” Easy says, eyes widening in horror. He takes a step back, and then a few more. “No way.”

“Yes way!”

“No, no, no, I am _not_ agreeing to this, _what_ are you doing? Get away from me, you hag! No, no, don’t you even—”

*

Aubrey thought about it a lot later – houses and homes, and how maybe there should be a word for something in between the two, not that he’d ever use it.

He thought about his own house, too many walls, too many rooms, never enough words.

How come, he thought, houses are boxes? How come, he thought, houses are not escape routes?

*

It goes like this: summer and autumn wrestling for yellow, all the others reaching out to touch Easy’s elbow, stretch his cheek, pat him on the shoulder, or ruffle his hair, and Aubrey watching it all like the paintings junkie that he is.

They’ve found a side road where there’s no cars for the practice, and they’ll ‘return the bike to where we found it later, Aubrey, I swear, calm down already.’

“I’m not sure about this,” Quickly says, reaching out to poke the bike. “Are you sure about this?”

“ _No_ ,” Easy says, horrified.

“I don’t have an antiseptic with me,” Quickly adds, troubled.

“You don’t carry it around with you?” Kipp asks, seemingly with genuine surprise.

At first, it’s Jerusalem holding the handlebars and Kipp holding the back of the bike as Easy lets out a string of swear words in at least four different languages but, after an hour or so, he starts getting the hang of it.

“I say you try without our help,” Jerusalem says, rubbing her hands together.

“I say he doesn’t,” Quickly groans, covering his eyes.

Easy, as if for the sole purpose of being contrary, does try it. Ten minutes later, he’s fallen off the bike three times, and is covered head to toe in dust. 

“I dislike public humiliation,” Quickly says, still not looking.

“It’s not public,” Kipp points out. “We’re in the middle of nowhere.”

Aubrey doesn’t say anything. He just watches. And watches, and watches, and watches, and half an hour later, Easy is still falling over, but he’s laughing too, and how.

He remembers what Treasure said about the Orangerie and nakedness, and he gets it, he really does. It’s the bravery of thinking a single picture worth having a blank wall all to itself, and as he stares at Easy speeding down the road, he decides that this, too, is like that. A little brave, a little worth it, a little the only thing that’s ever mattered – this moment in time, like something Aubrey would bottle up if he knew how.

Before, he thought, what if home was a road, and here’s one now, stretching in front of Easy, and look at him, already so fast. It’s almost like leaving cages is possible after all and like roads lead to somewhere for everybody, and not just for the lucky few. Slowly, as the sun hesitates before setting, Aubrey starts feeling all over again, as though someone has grasped the layer of numbness between their fingers and peeled it away like they would do with the bark of a fallen-over tree to get to all the alive underneath.

“He’s really something, isn’t he?” Kipp says when he catches Aubrey staring.

Aubrey doesn’t nod because, just then, Easy doesn’t seem like a something. Just then, he seems like a some _where_.


	2. ananke, october 2000

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> three instances in which the bicycle is horribly abused, again

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hi, hello, Supernatural has ruined my life but what else is new i guess :') Guys, it's so cold here that I wrote this chapter IN GLOVES. 
> 
> (it's quite short -- they'll alternate in part 3, so the next one will be criminally long) 
> 
> (also, multiple povs! none of them Aubrey!) (ALSO, shameless foreshadowing is what's happening here)

Andrew Judd, _Paint The Future_

*

Tonight, the fog says, _You are whole_ , but the body differs

& no self-portrait will tell you otherwise

& no wide landscape will accept you, broken as you are.

~ Andrés Cerpa, _Bicycle in a Ransacked City: An Elegy_

*

The bicycle is still there, no one came back for it, and she already has the ‘I told you so’ that she’ll sing in Aubrey’s ear on the tip of her tongue, sweet like an éclair.

“What’s so wonderful about it?” Regina asks, helping her clean the spokes of grass. It’s a lazy afternoon, the sun taking forever to set, and, not for the first time, Jerusalem wishes she could speed it up – the sun, the world, _all_ the worlds – so everything would spin _faster_.

“It’s how it’s _unexpected_ ,” she explains. “You didn’t expect it here, did you?”

Regina smiles.

“What, now?”

“Nothing,” Regina says, pushing her hair behind her ears. “I’ve forgotten that ‘unexpected’ can be ‘good’.”

“You’ve _forgotten_?” Jerusalem echoes. “How could you have forgotten when you couldn’t have expected me, and I’m certainly the best thing that’s happened to you here!”

Regina’s smile widens. “Not really,” she says, painfully blunt. “You _are_ in the top five though.”

She couldn’t say why but, just then, Jerusalem almost asks her if Lavinia makes the top five, too.

(Surely not. Why would she?)

“Top five!” Jerusalem says, indignant. “Top five, she says!”

Jerusalem has called her friends boring more times than she count but she’s never meant it, not once. She only said it because she _didn’t_ mean it, and it hits her, quite suddenly, that they must know that.

“Hey, Reggie.”

“Yes?”

“Do you think I can actually not butcher the role?”

She’d thought that Teddy would want her to play Beatrice because _I had rather hear my dog bark at a crow, than a man swear he loves me_ and because _O God, that I were a man! I would eat his heart in the market-place_ but Teddy decided that she would play Hero instead.

“But she’s so… blegh,” Jerusalem protested at the time.

“I do realise that you’re a born Beatrice,” Teddy said, irritated, “but acting’s not about _easy_.”

“Sure you can,” Regina says now, watching her with a frown. “You’re not really worried about it, are you?”

Jerusalem tries to smile, but she can feel that it’s more of a grimace. “It’s just hard, you know, having to be so… _collected_. It’s hard even when I try it for fifteen minutes, never mind more… Hey, imagine playing a role for a week, or a month, or a forever.”

“I’d rather not, thank you.”

“I’d rather not myself,” Jerusalem says, tapping her chin. “But what if someone had to?”

“I don’t follow.”

“I mean, wouldn’t it be exhausting?” Jerusalem says, frustrated. “Having to always pretend?”

Regina blinks at her, and then she smiles lazily. “You’re quite lucky, Sally,” she says, fond. “I hope it stays that way.”

“What? What are you talking about?”

“Nothing, nothing,” Regina says, waving her off. “Now, what is it you wanted to do with the bike?”

*

When Quickly mentioned the bike to Treasure, he expected her to laugh or maybe just hum the way one does when one has nothing to say.

He didn’t expect this.

“What a beauty,” Treasure says, and then whistles appreciatively. “It must be older than us.”

“It must be older than the two of us put _together_ ,” Quickly mumbles, nudging one handle bar with his foot. “I didn’t think you’d want to see it.”

“Oh, I didn’t want to _see_ it,” Treasure laughs. “I just wanted to ride it.”

Quickly doesn’t really understand Treasure most of the time, but he doesn’t think that’s bad as long as he keeps trying. Whatever this is seems like the sort of an uphill climb where you never get to the top, but he doesn’t mind: he doesn’t expect anything from this, not ever, not even for a second. Kipp can make fun all he wants and tease him about crushes, but Quickly doesn’t actually want to ‘marry Treasure and buy her three country houses.’ All he wants is for her to not die from tetanus, or malaria, or some other such thing, and surely, that’s not too much to ask. Surely, he’s not being greedy.

“Come on,” Treasure says, pushing the bike uphill, and Quickly follows, because that’s just how it goes.

“It doesn’t even have _brakes_ ,” he mutters but, as protests go, it’s half-hearted at best.

“That’s fine,” Treasure laughs. “I won’t need them.”

Quickly decided – and it _was_ a decision – to like Treasure soon after the start of their first year at Wilgefortis. He went for a walk in order to avoid developing several diseases that sitting in his room for long stretches of time could lead to, and spotted her on the grounds outside, feeding breadcrumbs to birds. She was crouched, watching them with her head tilted to the side and with her arms wrapped loosely around her knees, and he wondered what it would take for her to look away. He stood there, some distance away, waiting for her to get bored, but, before he knew it, an hour had passed and she was still there.

 _So she’s the kind of person_ , he thought, _who doesn’t consider spending an afternoon doing this a waste of time_. His grandfather had been the same – patient, attentive, like, if the world had been a book, he’d have lingered on every sentence – and Quickly used to get sad about it when he was small, how no one ever paid as much attention to his grandfather as the man would to, well, _everything_. Taking on the task was a challenge when he was seven years old, somewhat spoiled, and easily distracted, but he thought he’d ended up succeeding and he imagined that it’d be much easier at thirteen, only he couldn’t quite decide how to pay attention to someone without being creepy at the same time.

“You befriend them, idiot,” Kipp advised later, tossing peanuts into his mouth and only hitting himself in the eye every minute or so.

“Befriending people is scary,” Quickly said, horrified. “I’d rather go through a heart transplant.”

“Oh come, now, you’ve befriended me, haven’t you?”

“Have I?” Quicky said, dubious, because Kipp was something, but a friend wasn’t it. Certainly not yet, and maybe not ever.

“We’re here,” Treasure announces now, brushing sweat off her forehead. “Will you wait for me up here?”

“Up here…?” Quicky echoes faintly. Of course, in real life, when you climb a hill, sooner or later, you’ll have to go, well, downhill, but he’s forgotten all about it for a while there and now— “Oh, are you _mad_?”

Suddenly, he remembers how Treasure volunteered to climb that roof last year. He’s not sure how he missed it, what with the whole paying-attention-to-Treasure campaign, but, apparently, she has a death wish.

“We’re all mad here, or whatever it was the Cheshire Cat said,” Treasure says with a careless shrug.

“Some role model you’ve chosen there,” Quickly grumbles, staring at the steep road ahead of them. “Remember how I said this thing doesn’t even have brakes?”

“There’s grass down there,” Treasure says and has the nerve to actually point her finger, too. “I’ll live.”

“Yeah, see, I wouldn’t be so sure about that—” he starts, then trails off, because there’s something about Treasure’s face…

It’s how she looked on the train last month, haunted and barely-there, and God dammit, she’s been better. Hasn’t she been better?

“It’s like there’s a pond,” Treasure tells him, staring ahead. “Where everything stagnates.”

“Alright,” he says, confused.

“You don’t have to wait for me up here, you know,” she says, glancing at him, then away.

“Yeah, I don’t think I’m going to.”

“Oh.”

“I’m coming with.”

“Excuse me?”

“Down there,” Quickly says, and then, childishly, points his finger, too. “With you.”

Treasure’s eyes widen, and then she smiles. “Oh? But what about if we break our limbs, or our necks, or just simply die?”

He forces himself to shrug. “I guess we’ll be dead, then.”

“Guess so.”

“Mmm.”

“Your hands are shaking.”

“It’s arthritis.”

“Uh-huh. You’re fifteen.”

“It’s the early-onset form!”

Treasure stares at him for a long time. “Well, hop on then,” she says, slinging her leg over the bike.

Quickly counts to five, settles on the rear rack, and clears his throat.

“You have to hold on to me, you know,” Treasure says. She sounds amused.

“No, I don’t.”

“Yes, you _do_ ,” she laughs. “Do you want to fall off?”

“I don’t want to, I don’t know, _harass_ you.”

“Thank you, that’s very considerate of you,” Treasure says, sounding like she’s barely keeping herself from bursting out laughing. “I don’t feel harassed, though.”

“Well, that’s because I’m not holding on to you yet, but who knows how you’ll feel when I—”

She sighs, and reaches back, waving her arms until she’s gotten hold of his hands. She tugs on them and then links them in front of her stomach. “There.”

“Fine.”

“Great.”

Quickly sighs. “Normally, I’m not this childish.”

“Sure.”

“Can we get it over and done with?” he pleads, trying to decide if he should close his eyes.

“Keep them open,” Treasure advises, as if she’s read his mind, and then she starts pedalling and it all goes – literally _and_ figuratively – downhill.

It’s fine at first. It’s wind in hair, and Treasure’s hair in Quickly’s face, and sun warm like a blanket, and it’s speed, and then more speed, and then more speed still, only suddenly there’s a ditch, and then another, and then a rock, and then someone yells, and then everything hurts, and then the next thing he knows, Quickly’s spread on his back and hurting like one huge bruise.

Everything’s silent, but it’s no consolation: by now, he has the idea that Treasure’s not the sort to scream in pain. Before he opens his eyes, he allows himself a moment to remember everything he’s ever read about setting bones.

“See?” Treasure says as he blinks. “We’re alright.”

Quickly turns his head her way, where she’s spread on the ground next to him and smiling a dazed smile at the sky. The bike is a few feet away, overturned and with its wheels still spinning, and Quickly waits for them to stop but moments pass and they don’t.

“Are you hurt?” he asks, trying not to throw up.

“Skinned elbows,” Treasure says, dismissive. “This was nice.”

“Nice,” he groans. “Nice?!”

She smiles, and it’s like she’s back to normal, happy and alright again, and what’s a little blood?

“It’s about agency,” she says.

“What is?”

“I meant to say ‘thank you’,” Treasure says, and then scoots over and – Jesus and Mary and all the archangels – leans in to press her lips to his cheek. “Thank you.”

“Anytime,” Quickly mumbles, hoping that she understands that what he means by ‘anytime’ is ‘never again.’

It’s not that— he’s smiling _too_. It’s just that he can’t help but wonder how many times Treasure has done something like this before and how many times she’ll do something like this again, and it’s hard to smile after he’s thought _that_.

*

Kipp digs the bike out of whatever weeds Jerusalem left it in, and wishes he was the kind of person who kicks things. It’d be easier if he could feel anger or resentment the way kids his age are supposed to feel it, like everything is worth starting wars over, and not like something bad that he’s eaten refusing to settle, a discomfort that lasts a short while and then goes away.

Most of all, he thinks that hating Easy for how much December Graham adores him would be the ugliest thing he could possibly feel.

He kicks the bike experimentally a few times, but it’s not really doing anything for him, so he starts whistling instead. It starts as a silly tune and then turns into the beginning of _Linger_ , like he’s in some feel-good film about finding oneself. 

He was eight when his mother told him that one day he’d fall in love and “you better make her happy, Kippie.”

He was nine when he remembered it and thought, _but does it have to be a_ her _though?_

He was ten when December Graham kneeled in front of him in a crowded room and said ‘hello’ and, later, he thought, _so it_ is _a her after all._

He sits next to the bike and pats it a few times like he would a dog, an apology of a sort. 

“I don’t _actually_ hate him, you know,” he tells it. “It’s just that sometimes I wish he’d give me a reason to hate him, is all.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading <3


	3. on the subject of love -- interlude, autumn 2006

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> a list, a bottle of wine, and a secret

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ATTENTION PLEASE! So, this is not the super long chapter I promised. In fact, it's criminally short, but I had to rearrange them or I wouldn't post anything until, like, Sunday. The long one is still coming but....... uni deadlines + the list of things I've decided I have to do/finish before 2021 in order not to feel like a failure is a little intimidating, so. Anyway, I'll try to get the next one posted over the weekend, IM SORRY :') 
> 
> As for this one: the painting is just dramatic, ignore me. Now, the quote. My feelings on Bukowski: 
> 
> some poems -- good shit  
> other poems -- shit   
> prose -- i kind of see your point, C, but, even if you're being like this on purpose, please don't ever write about women again 
> 
> (i still prefer him to hemingway though!)

Sir Frank Bernard Dicksee, _The Crisis_

*

If you're losing your soul and you know it, then you've still got a soul left to lose.

~Charles Bukowski, _A dollar and twenty cents_

*

Lei sits Sparrow down at the table that they have now and puts a blank piece of paper in front of him.

“What now?” Sparrow sighs, staring at it. White. Too much white.

“Now,” Lei says, curling his fingers for him like Sparrow’s one of those dolls one can rearrange at will and placing a pen in his hand, “you’ll make a list.”

“A list?”

“A list,” Lei confirms, rounding the table to take the seat opposite Sparrow like it’s a job interview. Sparrow’s never been to one of those, or is that what his chess game with January was, all those months ago?

“A list of what?”

A list of deaths, maybe. He could easily name three.

“A list of everything you’re grateful for.”

Sparrow blinks at him.

“If you tell me you’re finished, I’ll kick you,” Lei warns.

“I don’t get you,” Sparrow says, pushing the page aside. “You’re supposed to be like me.”

Lei raises his eyebrows and leans back in his chair. “What’s that?”

“Bitter, resigned,” Sparrow says, waving his hand. “All those things you keep saying I am. Determined to survive, nothing less, nothing more.”

“My idea of survival isn’t finding some painting and disappearing off the face of the earth,” Lei points out, leaning back until his chair is standing on two legs. Sparrow resists the urge to reach across the table – and why is it so big, they don’t need it so big, they don’t need it _at all_ , it’s just the two of them – grab his sleeve and yank.

“Yeah, apparently, your idea of survival is writing stupid lists and standing around in a circle holding hands—”

“Hardly enough of us for a circle,” Lei laughs. “All I’m saying is, I want life to be a little more than just breathing. Nothing _too_ crazy, mind you. No parachutes or Disneylands, just… I want to cook something nice every now and then instead of settling for edible.”

“What’s wrong with edible?”

“Nothing,” Lei shrugs. “Except for how, technically, you could say that about cardboard.”

Sparrow sighs. “If January kicks you out before the year’s over, don’t blame me.”

“What? Does he hate enthusiasm too?”

“He sure acts like he does,” Sparrow mumbles, reaching for the piece of paper. “Does better water pressure count?”

“Sure,” Lei says. “Make it ten items.”

“You said everything I’m grateful for!” Sparrow protests. “Ten is pushing it.”

Lei stares him down, unimpressed. Sparrow spends the next five minutes scribbling things, crossing them out, and biting the pen, because he supposes he owes Lei. Lei’s been cooking dinners and saying hello to the neighbours and remembering laundry, and all Sparrow ever does is scrub things until it’s hard to say what’s in a worse state: the sponge or his hands, and feed strays that brave the roof outside their skylight, be it birds, cats, or insects. Last week, when Sparrow was responsible for establishing a colony of food-drawn crawly thingies in the gutter outside, Lei didn’t even sigh.

Once he’s done, the list includes:

better but still shitty water pressure

the pigeon with a missing eye that listens when Sparrow aggressively not-talks at it

the teabags they have, each one enough for five cups of weak tea

the fact that Monet lived, once

Alzheimer (something to look forward to)

scarves

fireplaces (not that they have one)

~~Lei~~

alcohol (Sparrow never drinks himself into oblivion but this, too, is something to look forward to)

Lei

The fact that when you shake a snow globe, the fake snow takes a while to settle

“I’m proud of you,” Lei says with a disturbingly wide smile when Sparrow passes him the page.

“Aren’t you going to read it?” Sparrow asks when Lei folds it without so much as glancing at it.

Lei smiles and pulls out a bottle of wine from underneath his chair. “Courtesy of January.”

“Hell,” Sparrow breathes, impressed enough to stare but not enough to whistle. “He _is_ wining and dining me.”

“It’s older than us,” Lei says, nodding appreciatively. “What do you say we get drunk?”

“I don’t drink,” Sparrow points out. “January _knows_ I don’t drink.”

“Wouldn’t it be sneaky of you,” Lei hums, “if you drank it then? He’d continue thinking you don’t drink, and he’d be—”

“Wrong,” Sparrow laughs. “Only however will we open it?”

Lei grins, and then he pulls out a knife.

*

Later, much later, Sparrow’s head is light, his body heavy, and the wine more golden than it has any right to be, sparkling as it sloshes in his glass as though someone has milked a star and then bottled it up.

 _Stars are made of hydrogen and helium_ , actually, the memory still living in Sparrow’s head despite the numerous attempts at exorcising it corrects.

“The thing is, I don’t get you either,” Lei says after he’s finished giggling over something Sparrow has already forgotten. “Did someone break your heart or something?”

“Or something,” Sparrow snorts, staring at the fingers of his right hand. There’s ten of them. He blinks, and it’s back to five. “Don’t be noisy. _Nosy_. Like a nose, not like the other thing. Noise. Not _that_. Nose. Nose-y.”

“Tell me,” Lei insists, turning over onto his stomach. They’re both spread out on the floor, like a yet-unattended crime scene.

“Did you get me drunk just for this?” Sparrow demands, more curious than angry.

“You got yourself drunk without my help,” Lei points out. “So you were in love with someone?”

“Maybe I’m in love with someone now,” Sparrow says, defensive.

Lei snorts. “I’m the only person— Oh, don’t tell me!”

“No,” Sparrow groans. “No, no, no, not _you_ , you’re so— _you_.”

Lei blinks at him. “So I’m an insult now?” he teases. “Who, then?”

“No one,” Sparrow insists. He scowls. “ _In love_.”

“Hmm?” Lei prompts. “Why the face?”

It’s already dark outside, and Sparrow’s hands are cold, and he doesn’t have gloves. He’d love a nice pair, something woollen and hand-made, something easily flammable that he wouldn’t burn this time.

“Love is—” he starts. “I just want my painting, Lei. That’s all I want. Love is—”

“Come on,” Lei laughs. “Finish a sentence, would you?”

“—useless,” Sparrow decides with a sigh. “Love is useless.”

All love is quite useless, Oscar Wilde never wrote, but did he ever think it?


	4. and dream of sheep, november-december 2000

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> where another bike makes an appearance

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> yes, i did name this chapter after a kate bush song. yes, it's because I really, really need to sleep now :''')
> 
> oh boy, this was really hard to write. it's like I forgot english all of a sudden. it's shorter than I wanted and clumsier than I wanted, and there's some cliche bed-sharing in this but it's not even all that self-indulgent so ??? this chapter just wouldn't cooperate, basically, so I apologise in advance for the quality!

Arthur Rackham, drawing of Kai and Gerda

*

I am making my loneliness small. So small it fits on a postcard

a baby rabbit could eat.

~Chen Chen, _West of Schenectady_

*

“What do you mean, you’re not going home for Christmas?” Jerusalem asks, poking Aubrey in the cheek. He pushes her finger away without looking up from his notes.

“I’m just not,” he says. “I’ve already discussed it with December Graham, and I’m staying here.”

Jerusalem stares at him like he’s grown a second head. “But don’t you want to go home?” she asks, placing her elbows on top of his notes so he’ll look at her. They’re in the library, her, Aubrey, and Kipp, and Aubrey doesn’t really understand why he’s been graced with their company since neither of them is doing any studying. So far, Jerusalem’s been busy pestering him, and Kipp has highlighted a dozen lines of poetry to learn by heart later in order to impress all the girls he didn’t have the time to impress last year.

“As a matter of fact, I don’t,” Aubrey mumbles, trying, in vain, to shove her elbow aside. “I’m actually looking forward to a Christmas where no one will even think of serving duck.”

“Won’t your parents miss you?” Jerusalem prods.

Aubrey shrugs.

“Aren’t you a little rebel,” Kipp says, smirking at him. “I bet they don’t even know yet.”

“Won’t you be sad and lonely and miserable?” Jerusalem demands, tugging on his collar, which his mother will not adjust for him, not today, and maybe not ever. “I mean, more so than usual.”

“I’m never sad and lonely and miserable,” Aubrey assures her, tugging on his notebook in a feeble attempt at freeing it. “I don’t have time for things like that.”

“You mean feelings?” Kipp asks with delight, chin in hand. “Nobody wants to be alone for Christmas, Aubrey.”

“I’ll hardly be alone, will I?” Aubrey mumbles. “Other kids are staying, aren’t they? _Easy_ is staying and…. what now?”

Kipp’s expression is something between a grin and a grimace.

“Don’t you know?” Jerusalem says with a pained smile.

“Know what?”

“I’ve invited Easy to spend Christmas at my house,” Kipp says, somehow managing to sound both apologetic and delighted about it. “It only took three attempts and a cake bribe for him to agree.”

“You’re not serious,” Aubrey says, wondering why he suddenly feels such a crushing wave of disappointment. It’s not like he ever dared imagine him and Easy having the whole school to themselves, talking about art in conversations that would lazily circle back to dropped topics, time sluggish like—

“I am,” Kipp insists.

Aubrey sighs and tries to look as though he’s not affected, but, judging by the fact that Jerusalem has silently moved her elbows away, he doubts it’s a successful attempt. 

*

“Is your brother coming to the play this year too?” Easy asks suspiciously when Teddy Willow demands that he repeat his lines for the tenth time.

“He’s not,” Bessie Lawrence says in a neutral voice.

Teddy gawks at her. “How do _you_ know?”

“I told you we’re friends,” Bessie says with a shrug. “I have letters to prove it, but I won’t show them to you because it’s my private correspondence, and besides, you’re kind of nasty.”

On Teddy’s other side, Frankie Stewart snorts, half-heartedly muffling it with her sleeve.

“You’re supposed to be on my side!” Teddy cries, scandalised.

“I’m still dating you,” Frankie points out. “You can’t honestly expect me to do anything beyond that.”

“ _Anyway_ ,” Teddy says, scowling at her. “It’s just not right, Weiss. I’m sorry, but that’s the truth. It’s not that you’re a bad Don John per se, it’s just that you have this whole” – here he breaks off to wave his hand in Easy’s direction in chaotic circles – “innocent thing going on.”

“Innocent?” Easy repeats, crumpling his script in his hand. “ _Innocent_?”

“No need to get upset,” Teddy says, bringing his hands up in a placating gesture. “You’re still young, a baby, practically, and besides—”

“A _baby_?” Easy repeats. Aubrey expects him to start yelling, but he only arches his eyebrow instead. “You’re only a few years older than me, and I bet you’ve never eaten a meal that didn’t require you to use three different forks anyway.”

Teddy opens his mouth but nothing comes out. He closes it after a while, sighs, and tries again. “This is still my play, you know.”

“Oh?” Easy says, arching his eyebrow again. He’s gotten really good at it – the other one doesn’t move at all. “I thought it was old Bill’s play, but whatever you say, captain oh captain.”

“I hate you all with a passion,” Teddy grinds out.

“That’s okay!” Kipp assures him enthusiastically from his corner. “I’ll take hatred over indifference any day!”

“You really did just sum up your attempts at a dating life in one sentence, huh,” Jerusalem hums.

“I’ll go bald before the year’s over,” Teddy whines into his copy of the script.

“That’s very pessimistic,” Aubrey tries consolingly. “The year’s over in less than two months.”

“You don’t say?”

“Unless you meant the school year,” Aubrey says with a smile. “That’s a little more realistic.”

*

He thinks about it later. He thinks about it a lot: Easy and innocence. He remembers what the inside of that car smelled like when they heard the woman called October kill someone mere feet away, and he imagines everything he doesn’t know about: the question mark of Easy’s years at the orphanage, spent doing things that couldn’t have been pleasant, but were they horrifying?

*

“He doesn’t even _like_ you,” Aubrey says when he’s halfway done with his soup, staring at Kipp accusingly. It’s just the two of them at the table, every sound echoing in this room that December Graham tries so hard to keep full of paintings every year.

(It was _The Blue Rider_ this year, and Aubrey didn’t cry, but it was close.)

“I meant it when I said I’m fine with everything but indifference, you know,” Kipp says, chin in hand. “It’s really quite fascinating.”

“What is?”

“The way you and Easy are about each other,” Kipp says, raising his eyebrows. “It’s almost animalistic, except for how you’re all proper and mild-mannered and meek and—”

“Yes, yes,” Aubrey interrupts, stirring his soup until all the parsley is soaked. “So you can’t stand indifference, huh?”

“I appreciate how, even when you’re angry with me – irrationally, might I add! – you’re still too polite to openly say what you’re thinking.”

Aubrey puts his spoon away and blinks at Kipp curiously. “What is it that I’m thinking, then?”

Kipp grins. “You’re thinking that it must be hard to bear, how indifferent December Graham is toward me.”

Aubrey manages a sheepish smile.

“Yeah, I thought so,” Kipp laughs, leaning back in his chair. “It’s a challenge, all right? I’ve still got three years, and it’s a challenge, so I don’t mind.”

“But what’s the goal here? She’s married and more than twice your age.”

“Don’t you know?” Kipp says, eyes gone comically wide. “It’s about the road, not about the destination.”

*

November’s in a huff this year, spitting brief and unexpected showers at every occasion and too impatient to let the lovely yellows of fallen leaves linger, all of them turned soggy and a shade of brown that might as well be grey. It’s an aggravating kind of cold, too, everyone taking their gloves off one minute and putting them back on the next, and, sometimes, breaths mist.

It’s vile, is what it is, but Aubrey takes walks to clear his mind anyway. He gets up early and sneaks around the room in his socks, waiting with putting his shoes on until he’s out in the corridor, and, by the time he usually gets outside, mist is still hovering over the ground, thick and milky like something he could catch in a mug to make cocoa with. It feels strangely intimate, being awake when everyone else is still asleep, except for how intimacy is something that’s supposed to be shared with someone. Maybe Aubrey’s sharing it with loneliness itself, now that it doesn’t hurt like a bruise and is something he’s more or less accepted, easily ignored but always there – something you share your living space with, but not your time.

He knows he’s being cruel, leaving his mother alone with his father. He imagines it: a sad Christmas, no carols, two people at a table for six, food gone cold and only the scraping of forks on bone for sound, but, hard as he tries, he can’t put himself there inside that picture, even though he remembers so well what it’s like to be in it.

It’ll be different this year, he decides. This year he’ll be alone without having to act like he’s not.

*

“And they’re just letting you stay here?” Treasure asks when Aubrey tells her he’s not going back home for Christmas, wide-eyed.

“Sure, the school—”

“No, your parents,” Treasure cuts him off. “I meant your parents.”

Aubrey shrugs, and Treasure doesn’t blink as she stares down, past the tips of their shoes and at the ground down below, stories away and looking like, rather than Earth’s cheek, it’s its teeth.

*

 _Much Ado About Nothing_ is not exactly a rousing success, as there are a few instances of people stepping on others’ dresses and skipping lines, but the applause after is deafening. When they all bow, Jerusalem’s hair sweeps the stage, and Aubrey thinks of how she must cut it sometimes, but when?

It’s a little crushing, the weight of everything he doesn’t know about all of them, and never will.

(And who cuts _Easy_ ’s hair for him anyway?)

Later, someone gives Treasure – who played Beatrice – flowers, and she tears up like she’s never gotten a bouquet before. She probably hasn’t, and when Aubrey searches the crowd for Quickly, he expects a jealous scowl but finds him smiling instead.

“You weren’t too innocent at all,” Jerusalem tells Easy later, once they’ve all changed out of costumes. She ruffles his hair and, maybe for the first time ever, he lets her, leaning into it rather than away. Aubrey feels something twist inside of him, like a rag being wrung dry.

“I sincerely apologise for the delay,” Kipp says, close to Aubrey’s ear, “but you’re invited, too.”

Aubrey stiffens, and Kipp laughs, a warm huff of a breath. “Relax, there won’t be any duck.”

“I couldn’t possibly—”

“Knew you’d say that,” Kipp sighs, pressing a hand over Aubrey’s mouth to quiet him, even though Aubrey is the sort of person who goes quiet when someone’s interrupted him, and Kipp knows. “I already told my mum to expect you so if you refuse now, it’ll be more impolite than accepting.”

*

“Well, isn’t that an interesting development,” December Graham says when Easy tells her he’ll be spending Christmas at Kipp’s, and oh, so will Aubrey. All in all, Aubrey’s glad Kipp’s not there to hear it. He thinks it’d be too much for his ego if he was.

*

“Welcome to my humble abode!” Kipp says once they arrive, spreading his arms dramatically in the hall.

“Hardly humble,” Easy whispers.

“Hardly yours,” Kipp’s father pipes in, unwinding his scarf. “I’m the one who’s paying the bills.”

Mr. Birdwhistle is a pleasant man who smiles a lot and always makes eye contact. The parting in his hair is even and his shoes are polished despite the sludge outside. He kept humming along with the radio during the drive, tapping the steering wheel and asking them about their favourite cakes because ‘my wife has ordered about a dozen, I hope you don’t mind, it’s just that she had no idea if you’d be allergic to nuts or put off by raisins, you know how it is.’ He and Kipp spent a good hour arguing over the merits of rolling one’s own cigarettes versus buying them ready-made which concluded with Mr. Birdwhistle politely reminding Kipp that if he ever caught him smoking, he’d stop paying his gossip magazines subscriptions and ‘worse things, painful things, this is me threatening you, Kipp.’

The house itself is huge but significantly smaller than Aubrey expected. The driveway doesn’t go on forever and, inside, there’s no marble. It’s less morose than Aubrey’s own, all light wood and big windows, as though light is welcome here, a guest rather than an impostor.

“This place would be nothing without me,” Kipp insists, carelessly kicking his shoes off.

“This place is just fine when you’re not here,” Mr. Birdwhistle laughs.

Easy leans close to Aubrey and whispers, almost in his ear: “What is it with you rich people and ceilings being so far away?”

Once, he wouldn’t have bothered whispering. Once, he wouldn’t have bothered many things. He’s been perfectly civil ever since he introduced himself to Kipp’s father, all polite smile – so he could smile like that, who would have thought? – and a flat ‘Ezra Weiss, sir,’ which, of course, met with an enthusiastic ‘oh, not ‘Mister’, _please_.’

“It smells like potatoes,” Kipp says, waving air in towards his face. “Why does it smell like potatoes?”

“Because I refuse to serve waffles for dinner, no matter how many times you ask,” Mrs. Birdwhistle says, appearing in the hall. She looks like Mary Poppins, only if Mary Poppins wore jeans.

“This is Aubrey,” Kipp says, pointing at him with his thumb. “He’s an art freak like you, so you’ll get along just fine. And this one here is Easy, who’s pretty much the opposite of easy, ha.”

“Lovely to meet you boys,” Mrs. Birdwhistle says with a brilliant smile. “Now, Kipp, won’t you give me a kiss?”

Kipp rolls his eyes but lets her pull him into a hug. “I have a reputation to uphold, you know.”

Mrs. Birdwhistle raises her eyebrows at them over his shoulder, and Easy shakes his head. She nods, a sort of a ‘thought so’.

The house smells like potatoes, lavender, and laughter, and Aubrey is glad that he’s come.

*

After dinner, during which Aubrey and Easy were subjected to a series of slightly intrusive but well-meaning questions, Mrs. Birdwhistle insists that she just _has_ to show them something, and would they come along?

She drags them through the house, and the press of her fingers around Aubrey’s wrist is a sort of easy familiarity that he doesn’t ever expect from his own mother, much less someone he met a dozen smiles ago. Kipp has all of her charm but only about a half of her warmth, and Aubrey finds that he doesn’t mind the touch.

“Here,” she says, ushering them into a spacious room at the end of the hall. The first thing Aubrey notices once he steps inside is the piano. The second is the Cézanne.

It’s _Harlequin_ , and maybe Aubrey should have expected it: after all, Kipp did tell him that he met December Graham at an auction.

“Do you like it?” Mrs. Birdwhistle asks, eyes twinkling. “I fall in love with the way he’s standing whenever I enter the room.”

“It’s beautiful,” Aubrey says dutifully, because what else is there to say? What else is there to say, ever, except for inadequate words that are somehow supposed to be a response to all the time someone spent dreaming, visualising, and finally painting something. “I don’t recognise the one next to it.”

The other painting is of a girl mid-spin, her hair full of flowers and one of her arms missing.

Mrs. Birdwhistle laughs good-naturedly. “This one is my sister’s,” she says. “It’s quite good, isn’t it?”

Easy looks up at that, and Aubrey knows what he must be thinking, because he’s thinking the very same thing: when Mrs. Birdwhistle buys a painting, it must be because she loves it to pieces, and not because it’s well-known and expensive, since the frame of her sister’s painting is no less baroque than the one that drips gold around _Harlequin._

“Well boys,” she says, hands on her hips as she watches them with amusement. “I think we’ll get on famously.”

*

They each get a separate room but Mr. Birdwhistle tells them that they can all cram in the same bed for all he cares.

“No way,” Kipp whispers once his father has turned away. “I’m not sharing my plump mattress with you plebeians.”

“Plebeians? Really?” Easy says, unimpressed. “What do you need so many rooms for anyway?”

“Why, so I don’t have to listen to your snoring in situations such as this one,” Kipp says, rolling his eyes.

“I don’t _snore_.”

“Well, you _breathe_ ,” Kipp says, waving his hand lazily, and Aubrey throws him a pitying smile because it won’t work: he likes Easy well enough to have invited him here, and so it’s too late to pretend his way out of the sentiment.

“I’m not going to apologise for _breathing_ ,” Easy hisses.

“Oh, that’s all right,” Kipp says loftily. “I imagine you wouldn’t apologise for snoring either.”

Later, after they’ve unpacked, showered, and missed sunset, Mrs. Birdwhistle hands each of them an apple (‘an apple a day…’) and tells Aubrey that he can phone his parents if he so wishes with an expectant smile that communicates that she’s assumed he does wish so. Aubrey briefly considers faking a conversation, but, tired of feeling cruel and uncharitable, he ends up dialling his home number.

“Hello?” his mother picks up on the second ring, like she misses him too much to bother trying to hide it.

“It’s me,” Aubrey says awkwardly, cupping his hand around the phone because, stupidly, he feels like it’ll somehow protect her voice from dissolving into air. Then, out of order, “hello.”

“Aubrey,” his mother says, like it’s okay for his name alone to be a sentence. “Is it snowing over there?”

Aubrey glances out the window, where there’s nothing but black and black, like someone has spilled ink all over their unfinished letter of a world.

“It’s not _raining_ ,” he says, and she laughs, even though it’s hardly funny.

“Did you wear a hat?” she prods.

“Yes.”

“Did Ezra?”

“Yes.”

“And Kipp?”

“ _Yes_.”

“And did you pull it over your ears?” his mother whispers. Aubrey imagines her listening to the rustle of his father’s newspaper, not wanting him to hear. “You can’t lose your ears, Aubrey, what would the neighbours say?”

It’s stilted, and it’s a disaster, but Aubrey’s too tired to regret calling. He’s still angry but he tries to forget it for a minute or two, because isn’t it enough that he’s angered himself all the way into someone else’s house?

Later, Kipp takes one look at him and sighs. “Pancakes? Pancakes.”

They eat some of them with honey and some with sugar and lemon. Mr. Birdwhistle teaches Easy how to flip them and Aubrey watches, wishing time would stumble on this moment and hesitate like a scratched record.

“Do stop it,” Kipp whispers, watching him with a frown.

“Sorry?”

“Gaping,” Kipp explains with a theatrical sigh. “It’s not Disneyland, you know. You’re only here for the good parts.”

Aubrey blinks at him and thinks, unkindly, cruelly even, _ah, but you don’t know._

*

It’s the middle of the night when someone knocks on the door of the room Aubrey’s staying in. It doesn’t wake him up because he’s still awake, staring at where he can just make out the ceiling, imagining his mother washing dishes by hand, and oh, how chapped her knuckles must be. They always are, this time of the year.

“I’ve never slept alone in a room before,” Easy explains when Aubrey opens the door and finds him on the other side. “Can I stay here, on the floor?”

He shoves past Aubrey without waiting for a reply and swears when he trips over something. He’s trailing a blanket and there’s a pillow under his arm.

“We can share!” Aubrey says, closing the door behind Easy. “We can share. I won’t kick, and I don’t snore, and the bed is big so there’s no way—”

“Aubrey,” Easy says sleepily, and it’s so rare for Easy to say his name that Aubrey instantly shuts up. “Has it ever occurred to you that people don’t actually hate having you places?”

Aubrey stares at him in the dark, taken aback. “Has it… sorry?”

“No one’s forcing me to be friends with you, you know,” Easy says in a monotone voice. “No one’s forcing any of the others to be friends with you either.”

“I don’t think—”

“You _act_ it,” Easy says, getting onto the bed. He takes Aubrey’s side of the mattress and sighs contentedly when he curls up there, burrowing into the warmth. “Shut up, now.”

Aubrey rounds the bed and gets in on the other side. He arranges himself under the covers, careful not to let his knees bump into any part of Easy, and wonders if he’ll dream tonight.

“That film we watched before,” Easy mumbles, muffled by the pillow.

“What about it?” Aubrey whispers. It was _The Shop Around the Corner_ , and Easy spent so much time acting like he hated it that Aubrey knew he actually didn’t.

“Too many misunderstandings,” Easy complains, shifting around with a held breath, like he’s not used to beds so soft that springs don’t creak whenever you exhale. “Why don’t people talk?”

“It worked out in the end,” Aubrey says after a moment’s thought.

“Yeah,” Easy mumbles sleepily. “ _In the end_.”

“Goodnight,” Aubrey says, too late, Easy already asleep.

*

“How cosy,” Kipp laughs when he flings the door open in the morning, his hair tangled like something’s been nesting in it. “When was the wedding and why wasn’t I invited?”

Easy is sprawled sideways across the bed and half on top of Aubrey, and Aubrey, who has a book propped on the back of Easy’s head, stares at Kipp and wishes he had the guts to throw a shoe at him.

*

“Please, don’t hold it against me, but I’m actually not a huge Picasso fan,” Mrs. Birdwhistle tells Aubrey around noon, unwinding the Christmas lights wrapped around their tree for the fourth time.

Aubrey smiles and promises not to. He finds it’s a relief to talk to someone who hasn’t been made to think cracks and breaks charming.

*

Their second night in the house, Aubrey can’t sleep either. Easy’s not there and Aubrey wonders if it means he’s decided to brave being alone – _maybe I do kick, maybe I do snore_ – or if, perhaps, it means that he…

His mother, lifting a fork to her mouth, a napkin at her elbow, her lips slowly forgetting how to shape a smile.

Aubrey gets up and thank God for houses like this one, where floorboards don’t creak.

“What are you doing?” Easy asks once Aubrey gets all the way to the front door, hand on the handle. “Why are you wearing a _coat_?”

Aubrey tightens his grip on the handle and doesn’t turn around. He almost asks Easy where he came from, but thinks better of it.

“The thing is, I can’t stay here.”

“You can’t… What does that even _mean_?”

“I need to get home.”

Easy snorts. “And you’re going to what, _walk_ there?”

“I haven’t— I just— I wasn’t _really_ going to go.”

“You want to, though,” Easy guesses. “What’s wrong?”

Aubrey leans forward until his forehead rests against the wood of the door. He thinks he makes a sound, a miserable moan, but he can’t be sure.

Behind him, Easy sighs. “Wait here. Don’t move. Not an inch. Not a centimeter either.”

Aubrey, used to doing things people tell him to do, stays. Five minutes, or maybe a forever later, Easy appears at his side in the coat Lavinia bought him, ready to go.

“What are you doing?” Aubrey says, horrified.

“I’m not doing anything,” Easy shrugs. “ _We_ are stealing Kipp’s bike.”

Aubrey thinks of protesting – thinks of reminding Easy that they’re guests here, that it’s not right – but he doesn’t have the strength. It’s a short walk to the shed, which the family keeps unlocked, and the bicycle waits inside, brown and wiped clean, as if they’re supposed to take it.

“It’s at least fifty miles,” Aubrey says.

Easy shrugs. “We have the whole night. And then the whole day. And then— forever, really.”

It’s fairy-tale easy to leave the house behind, like it’s a dream and they’re floating away instead of walking. The trees seem to be leaning back, as if to let them through, even though there’s plenty of space, and darkness is thick in a sweet way, like melted candy Aubrey could lick off his fingers.

“It’s actually easy to leave places,” Easy tells him when Aubrey hesitates by the gate. “What’s hard is deciding whether you should.”

Aubrey stares at him and wonders if he could get away with telling Easy the truth: that, if it was with him, there’s no place he’d mind leaving.

“I’ll ride first, and you just hold on,” Easy says, getting on the bike. Aubrey sits behind him and doesn’t waste time pretending he won’t have to wrap his arms around Easy’s middle.

“It’s up North,” he tells the back of Easy’s neck, and Easy starts pedalling until they’re cycling down an empty stretch of a road. The wheels are quiet on asphalt, almost like they’re not there at all, and there’s something comforting about it: how, maybe, they’re already somewhere else, in a near future where everything is that little bit more orderly.

“Do you know that stupid song?” Easy asks at some point, and God, he’s so _thin_. He’s been eating, Aubrey’s been _watching_ , and why is he so thin?

“I know all kinds of stupid songs,” Aubrey lies. “You have to be a little more specific.”

“Bessie sang it to me the other day,” Easy says. “It goes lalala lalala la-la-la.”

“Well, what is it about?”

“Something about being weak, and about dreaming, and about—”

“Sheep?” Aubrey guesses. “That’s Kate Bush.”

“I don’t care who it is,” Easy snorts. “It’s pretty much like this, that song.”

“Like what?”

“Don’t you see? Look.”

Aubrey, who’s been staring at the goosebumps on the back of Easy’s neck where the scarf Regina gave him slid down, looks up and sees the first snowflakes seconds before they catch on his eyelashes.

“Oh,” he breathes, surprised. Everything is already so quiet around them, and yet here’s the world, making it quieter still.

Easy stops the bike slowly, the way people fall asleep rather than how they wake, even though what they’re doing is the latter.

“We’re not actually going anywhere, are we?” Aubrey says. He’s not disappointed. He’s not anything.

Easy shrugs. “No map, no food, no nothing— It’s just, you looked like you’d crawl out of your skin if you didn’t at least _try_.”

“Do you know, I think I would have,” Aubrey admits. He lets himself, just for a second, just for a moment, press the cold tip of his nose to that strip of skin above Easy’s scarf. “ _Thank_ you.”

He didn’t think he’d get even this much: not having to try all by himself.

They get off the bike and stay there for a while, watching snow, the flakes fat and wet like it can’t wait to be snowmen in the morning. Easy keeps his hands on the bike’s handlebars but, just then, Aubrey can’t help but think that, if he let go, the bike would magically stay upright. 

*

In the morning, Mrs. Birdwhistle drives him to the train station and assures him it’s no problem when he apologises for the twelfth time, all ‘it was lovely to have you’, all ‘do come again.’

As they wait for the train, Aubrey imagines Easy knocking on Kipp’s door in the evening, a pillow under his arm, and he presses his finger to the corner of his mouth to check if he’s frowning or smiling, because he just can’t tell.

“Nasty weather,” Mrs. Birdwhistle complains, rubbing her hands together. “Are you cold?”

When they woke up in the morning, the snow was gone, as though it had been just for the two of them, or as though it had never been there in the first place.

“I’m warm, actually,” Aubrey assures her and hums when he hears the far-off sound of an approaching train.

The thing is, he doesn’t know if what he’s doing is going home or walking back into a cage.

The thing is, he might not want to spend Christmas with his mother, but that doesn’t mean that he wants to spend it _without_ her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you for reading <3


	5. wayfarers, december 2000

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “ _I’m sick to death of this particular self_ ,” Alfie quotes. “ _I want another._ ”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hello everyone, have another almost-Christmas chapter because IT'S COMING agvgasfdfdg (yes, I am a fan, even with how commercialised it is)

René Magritte, _Decalcomania_

*

Sure,

I sink the boat of love, but that comes later. And yes, I swallow

glass, but that comes later.

~Richard Siken, _Litany in Which Certain Things Are Crossed Out_

*

When Alfie falls asleep, it only lasts a second, because he instantly bangs his head on the library desk and wakes.

“Coffee, I think,” May says brightly, tilting her head at him.

“Alcohol?” October muses, reaching out to poke his forehead where he’ll no doubt have a bruise come morning.

“Why are you two here again?” Alfie asks, staring between them hopelessly. He’s getting pretty tired of beautiful people waltzing into his life, stealing things, plotting, and invading his personal space with the sort of confidence reserved for those who spent years forcing locks.

“Ballet tickets,” May reminds him, waving them in front of his face. “You’re my date, remember?”

“That’s… not… why you’re here,” Alfie says slowly, trying to remember what they’d been doing before he drifted off. “Oh, wasn’t I supposed to convince you to buy that Hopper for December?”

“You’re doing a rather poor job of it,” October tells him, throwing him a pitying look.

“ _The Lee Shore_ , yes,” May says with an apologetic smile. “Surely you can see why she’d want it? It’s quite lovely if I do say so myself.”

“Why do I have to convince you, then?” Alfie demands, rubbing his eyes.

“It’ll draw unnecessary attention if I start buying paintings,” May sighs. “I’ve gotten rather used to staying on the sidelines.”

“If we waited for someone else to buy it, I could steal it for you,” October tells her with a far too careless shrug. “Like old times.”

“Old times,” May echoes with a bittersweet smile, leaning back on her arms. She’s sitting on the desk, legs swinging like she’s a little girl at a too-big dinner table. “If you stole it, you’d insist that I keep it.”

“And why shouldn’t I?” October says, inspecting her nails. “You like it as much as _she_ does, even if you won’t admit it. It’d look nice in your living room, on that wall on the left, above the piano. It’d look nice with the flowers you keep there, and it’d look nice with your hair.”

“I’d rather Dee had it,” May says quietly. “She should—”

“Have anything she wants, is that it?” October interrupts. She sounds amused, but there’s something sharp about it, something that Alfie, sleep-heavy, can’t quite identify.

“About that ballet,” he mumbles, pointing his finger at October like the uncultured stray that he is. “Why not take her?”

October swears in Polish, scowling at him. “ _Ballet_ ,” she spits, “is fucking _creepy_. There are ways in which legs just shouldn’t bend, little librarian.”

“I’m not so little compared to you,” Alfie protests.

“And you’ve done your own share of unnatural bending, Berry,” May point out in a pleasant tone. “Remember when we were stealing that Seurat and the alarm went off? Why, you were like an acrobat.”

Alfie stares at them, beyond exhausted.

“Anyway,” May says, smiling at him sweetly. “Berry would actually agree to accompany me, I’m sure, but she’s otherwise engaged, so I’m left with you.”

“Otherwise engaged?” Alfie prods. “And aren’t you married?”

“Oh, my husband doesn’t remember which drawer he keeps his ties in, much less any events I’d like him to attend! Besides, I haven’t seen the man in… hmm… three weeks now?”

“What kind of marriage is that?” Alfie asks, gawking at her. He remembers December telling him that May doesn’t love her husband, but.

“A marriage of convenience, of course,” May says, amused. “We make it work, and he’s a lovely man, but it’s more contract than affection. Oh, why that face? I take it you go around falling in love with people, then, hmm?”

Alfie slides low in his chair. “Not anymore.”

“The last one stuck, is why,” October says in a theatrical whisper.

“So what it is that you’re doing that you can’t go see the ballet with her?” Alfie asks tiredly.

October shrugs. “Spy stuff. Theft. Murder. Same old, now May here has gotten me tangled in Little Dee’s web again.”

“ _Jesus_.”

“She’s only kidding about murder,” May assures him.

“I am _not_.”

“And why can’t ‘Dee’ go with you while we’re at it?” Alfie demands.

Silence.

Alfie looks between the two of them again. There’s something very careful about how they’re not looking at each other.

“ _What_?”

“Me and Dee, we don’t go places together,” May laughs. “Different crowds, I’m sure you understand.”

“I don’t think I do, no,” Alfie says as he straightens in his chair, intrigued. “I bet her crowd has more to do with yours than mine does, in any case.”

“You don’t really _have_ a crowd, do you?” October mocks, arching an eyebrow. “A loner, you are.”

“Pot, kettle,” Alfie mumbles.

“Except I’m a loner by choice,” October reminds him.

“Yes,” May says, sharp as a knife. “A decade of choices.”

October makes a show of inclining her head and pretending innocence. “Oh? Have you got something to say about that?”

“Long years of choosing, over and over again,” May says in a childish, sing-song voice. Maybe it’s supposed to make up for how she’s no longer swinging her legs.

“I don’t stay where I’m not wanted,” October says with a shrug.

“You must never stay places then,” Alfie mutters under his breath. She catches it anyway because _of course_ she does.

“I don’t!” she agrees brightly. “I’m what you’d call a vagabond, though I like the Polish word better. _Włóczykij_. Like: drags-a-stick. You know, the way they’d do it back when, a bundle tied to a branch and off they’d go.”

“Except you don’t have a bundle,” May points out.

“I don’t really need one,” October laughs. “See, Alfred, I don’t need anything.”

The way the memory of Yante slams into Alfie just then almost has him keel over.

“Oh, I’d say you do need a thing or two,” December says, appearing in the doorway like a magic trick. Her smile is warm, but her eyes are cool. “Why are you two bothering Alfie again?”

“Your fault,” he reminds her, blinking at her slowly.

“Was it?” she says, not sounding sorry _at all_. “You look awful.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t say he looks _awful_ ,” May says cheerfully, that polite high-society smile directed Alfie’s way yet again. “Just… ready for bed.”

“Or for the grave,” December says, rolling her eyes as she steps inside. “How about you head home early?”

“Three more hours of work,” Alfie reminds her. “What if someone will want to use the library?”

“Less than twenty kids are staying here for Christmas this year,” December points out, “and I’m sure they have better things to do than _reading_ one day before Christmas Eve.”

Alfie tries to muster up enough energy to argue with her because she’s wrong, she’s very, very wrong, but he can’t remember how rhetoric works so he settles for looking scandalised instead.

“And even if some little soul does wonder in, we’ve got it covered,” May assures him, reaching out to rub two fingers over his shoulder in a circle. From what Alfie’s gathered, she’s not big on touching, and it feels like crossing some line, the point of no return.

 _What_ , Alfie thinks with dread slowly spreading inside him, _exactly have I gotten myself into?_

“Yeah, how hard can it be?” October says, grabbing a book off the stack teetering on the edge of the desk. “They ask for something about a loser moping around for two hundred pages because a girl doesn’t like him and you give the kid _The Sorrows of Young Werther, or The Sad Fate of Those Who Aren’t Getting Any._

Alfie is so exhausted that he actually checks the cover of the book for the subtitle with bulging eyes. October grins at him, amused.

“ _The Great Gatsby_ would work too,” May says, grabbing it off the stack.

“And,” December plays along, reaching for the next one. “so would _The Age of Innocence_!”

“And of course,” October says, triumphant, as she takes hold of yet next one, “ _Moby Dick_ would, too. Oh, but would it?”

December laughs like she’s forgotten that she and October are supposed to act like they hate each other.

“Well,” May says, cocking her head. “Ahab does seem rather taken with that whale, doesn’t he?”

They all turn to stare at Alfie.

“The thing is,” he says, pushing his glasses up, “someone _did_ ask for novels about men who, as you put it, mope around because they’re in love.”

May’s smile widens into something genuine, and it’s so spectacular that, for a second, Alfie regrets that he’ll never fall in love for the fifty-ninth time. “So you do agree about _Moby Dick_ belonging in the category, then?”

“Well,” December says, amused. “They do say that the line between hate and love is—”

“Thick,” October snaps with a challenging look. “It’s thick.”

Silence again. Desperate to fill it, Alfie clears his throat.

“So what are your plans for Christmas Eve, anyway?”

May blinks at him like it’s never occurred to her to plan for it, and October smiles, wry.

“I’m making barszcz,” she announces proudly, and then licks her lips.

“What she means is that she’ll have it out of the bag,” May translates with a wink. Alfie resists the urge to wink back, wondering what it is that makes all these people so charming. It can’t possibly be looks alone.

“I boil water, I make it,” October argues.

“Now!” December says, clapping her hands together. “Go home, Alfie. You’ve been here for two days, I know you have, and I’ll need you rested for tomorrow’s dinner.”

“ _We_ ’re not making barszcz,” Alfie points out, trying to pronounce it right and failing.

December smiles. “No, but we do have twenty kids to feed,” she says. “Go. _Now_.”

*

By the time Alfie gets home, he’s so tired that he pulls on the door handle, forgetting that he needs to dig out his key first. It takes him a moment to remember to be surprised when it gives.

He exhales slowly, counts to three because counting to ten would be too self-indulgent, and stalks inside.

He expects to find Yante in the bedroom but he’s in the kitchen instead, reading the copy of _Orlando_ Alfie left there in the morning. He startles when Alfie leans on the doorway, surprised and clearly displeased.

“You must have heard me come in,” Alfie points out, surprised by Yante’s surprise, ha. “Didn’t you hear me come in?”

Yante, who looks gaunt and pale, who looks cold and miserable, who’s still like a bloodstain, but the kind that dried a long time ago, rubs the back of his neck and carelessly tosses the book to the middle of the table. Alfie doesn’t mind: it’s an old, worn copy, all dog-eared pages and bent spine, and, against himself, he enjoys the idea of Yante making it more worn still, leaving invisible fingerprints all over the pages Virginia Woolf wrote thinking of her Vita. ‘The longest and most charming love letter in literature’ indeed, and the fact that it was published and that so many people have read it since is the closest thing to getting to shout one’s love from the rooftops that Alfie can think of.

“You weren’t supposed to be back until later,” Yante says, trying for his usual brand of careless and failing. “Very pretentious, this.”

He waves his hand in the general direction of the book, and Alfie smiles.

“Is that why you’re already halfway through?”

Yante snorts. “I started in the middle.”

“Of course you did,” Alfie says, amused. “How often do you come here when I’m away, really?”

“See, if you actually minded, you’d change the locks,” Yante mutters.

“That’d be a little pointless, wouldn’t it?” Alfie says, inclining his head. “You clearly don’t find the lock I have now challenging, and I can’t really afford a better one.”

Of course, he knows what Yante really means. Changing the locks, though futile, would be a statement of a sort, and Alfie stubbornly hasn’t made it: all this time, and he’s failed to turn the place into something that’d scream ‘stay away’. Frankly, it doesn’t even whisper it.

“Only every now and then,” Yante says, surly. It’s oddly charming on him, and Alfie struggles to keep himself from grinning. 

“Sorry?”

“Answering your earlier question, Alfie, keep up,” he says, rolling his eyes. “How will the library survive without you?”

“I really don’t know,” Alfie says with a smile that should feel strained but doesn’t. “Terrible things happen when I’m not there.”

“Exactly.”

“It’s only logical that I should keep an eye on it, always,” Alfie continues, pushing off the doorway to cross the room toward Yante.

“Mhm.”

“Well, on it, or on _you_.”

Yante’s eyes meet his, and he doesn’t quite manage to look blasé.

“You look like you haven’t slept in a week,” Alfie says, trying to sound like he’s stating a fact rather than begging for an explanation.

“So do you.”

“ _I’m sick to death of this particular self_ ,” Alfie quotes. “ _I want another_.”

“How greedy of him,” Yante snorts.

“How greedy of her,” Alfie adds, dragging his finger along the cover of _Orlando_ because he can’t drag it along Yante’s neck, not just yet.

Yante’s attempt at a pitying look is truly valiant.

“No, you don’t get to do that,” Alfie laughs, tapping his finger on the ‘O’ of the title. “You don’t get to act like I’m some pathetic stray that always comes back for more, not when it’s my place we keep meeting at.”

“This is disgusting,” Yante complains, leaning back in his chair and staring at the ceiling. “I bet whenever I disappear these days, you no longer think it’s forever.”

Alfie takes mercy on him and doesn’t admit it, or maybe it’s not mercy. Maybe it’s fear. He thinks if he said it Yante would try to prove him wrong, and he thinks that it wouldn’t even be out of spite.

“Hey, since we both look like we haven’t slept a week, why don’t we make up for it now?” he says instead, nudging Yante’s knee with his own.

“Disgusting,” Yante repeats but, when Alfie wraps his fingers around his wrist and tugs, he follows.

Once they’re in the bedroom, Alfie doesn’t bother turning the light on. He does plug in the Christmas lights wrapped around the shabby tree he dressed a week ago, smiling at the golden hue. He crawls into bed and the trail of clothes – coat, scarf, shirt – littering the floor looks like what he rarely allows himself to remember. He waits for Yante to settle next to him before wrapping them in a blanket and tangling their legs together.

Yante’s like a puppet, limp and offering no protests when Alfie rearranges him on the pillows and peels his shirt off, and it would be terrifying if it wasn’t so intoxicating. Alfie wonders what it says about him that something that’s a source of worry for him is also a source of delight.

He doesn’t kiss Yante but he does worry at his earlobe with his teeth because it’s right there and so soft – so soft that Alfie wonders how Yante can live with it, he who always needs to be rough.

“Sleep,” he whispers, pushing Yante’s eyelids closed for him with the tip of his finger.

Truth is, Alfie never forgets that time Yante took him to the coast and wants _The Lee Shore_ himself.

Truth is, if Yante wanted to steal it for him, Alfie would let him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> just to clarify: I actually adore all the classics they make fun of in this chapter (except for the sorrows of young werther because oh boy, that book................. 1/10) and I love ballet too! (& don't find it creepy whatsoever plus ballerinas = superhumans) No hate! 
> 
> Thank you for reading <3


	6. the drawing mania, february 2001

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> when inspiration strikes, or something

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> so at some point I said that I'd like to be half done with part 4 by the end of the year which, haha, that's not happening. But I do intend to be done with part 3 by then, so expect the next 3 chapters before New Year's Eve I guess? 
> 
> Anyway, this chapter technically has some sad moments but the ending is just shameless fluff which I didn't plan to write but which somehow happened anyway. Feel warned because I can't afford to pay for your dentist visits if your teeth rot from it! 

Victoria Fomina, _The Snow Queen 5_

*

What does a fly do, imprisoned

In one of Petrarch’s sonnets?

~Pablo Neruda, _The Book of Questions, X_

*

They’ve been back at school for a month, and Easy won’t stop staring at him.

“Do I have ink on my face or something?”

“Do I have chocolate on my face?”

“Are my glasses dirty?”

“What _is_ it?”

“Is it toothpaste?”

“I told you,” Easy keeps saying, rolling his eyes like he’s angry with Aubrey for daring to distract him from watching Aubrey like he’s a test tube that’s about to explode. “I’m trying to figure something out.”

“Figure _what_ out?”

“You’ve already had this conversation,” Kipp points out one time, looking up from his book of jokes, a Christmas present from Jerusalem ‘because, no matter what you think, you don’t have a good sense of humour, Kipp, you just don’t’. “I’ve been there for at least three re-enactments of it. Now is when Easy says something along the lines of ‘nothing, not your business, nothing, shut up, leave me alone, Jesus, nothing, God’.”

“I don’t talk like that!” Easy snaps.

“You might not talk like that, but that’s certainly how you bark,” Kipp tells him, quirking an eyebrow.

“I don’t understand a thing,” Aubrey says, glancing between the two of them in confusion.

“That’s alright,” Kipp says, clapping him on the shoulder with a dazzling smile. “You’re not supposed to.”

He sends Easy a challenging grin but Easy just watches him calmly without rising to the bait.

“Beware,” Kipp breathes, amused, “lest I figure it out first.”

He winks at Easy with such confidence that, whatever they’re talking about, Aubrey wouldn’t be surprised if it turned out that he already _has_.

The drawing mania doesn’t start until February, but when it hits, nobody’s notebooks are safe. Easy runs out of free pages faster than the second-floor bathrooms run out of paper towels on Mondays, and he walks around the school shaking his wrist and flexing his fingers, too used to clutching a pencil.

“Maybe it’s the cold,” Jerusalem says one day, watching him turn the page of a notebook he stole from her for the tenth time in an hour. “Maybe he’s just trying to keep his hands warm.”

“Doesn’t he have gloves?” Kipp laughs. “Gloves or armpits, anyway.”

“He has gloves,” Regina assures them. “I’ve taken care of it.”

“That’s how artists are, isn’t it?” Quickly says, for once not pulling his hair out in worry. “When inspiration strikes, or something.”

“Must be some inspiration,” Jerusalem says, watching Easy with a frown. “Is he even eating?”

“When you put a fork with food on it in front of him, he does,” Kipp affirms. “Lately, it’s like I’m Mary Poppins.”

“Except for how she looked nicer in a dress,” Jerusalem says.

“Except for that.”

“When have you seen him in a dress?” Quickly squeaks, glancing between them.

“What happens backstage stays backstage,” Kipp says with a conspiratorial smile.

“No, not really,” Jerusalem laughs, winking at Quickly. “I have pictures!”

“But what is he drawing anyway?” Aubrey asks, watching as Easy tears a page out, rolls it into a ball, and stuffs it down his pocket across the common room.

Jerusalem puts her hands up as if to say ‘I’m not touching that.’ “I tried sneaking a peek and he almost bit my hand off.”

“I tried too, and he went for my _ear_ ,” Kipp whines. “Even I couldn’t pull off a Van Gogh, so thanks but no thanks.”

“I think we should respect his privacy,” Regina says wisely.

“I don’t respect his privacy at all,” Jerusalem assures her. “I do, however, like having two hands, so you have my word that I won’t snoop.”

Regina’s smile is a dry thing, but it’s there.

*

A few days after the end of Christmas break, Aubrey found Treasure at the back of the school, staring up at the building with her hands clenched into fists.

“I can’t climb up,” she confessed after they’d spent five minutes standing together in silence. “I just can’t.”

Aubrey sent her a questioning look and she frowned at her shoes.

“Everything hurts,” she explained with a shrug. Her lips were thin, and she was clearly trying to sound indifferent about it, but she didn’t quite get there.

“Why?” Aubrey asked simply. He had a feeling she’d hate it if he tried anything else.

Treasure smiled, that little bit too wide. “Sledging gone wrong.”

Aubrey knew that she lived down South and that it hadn’t snowed there, but he didn’t mention it. She couldn’t climb up, so he wouldn’t either.

He didn’t know when but, at some point, it’d become like that.

*

A persistent journalist comes one day and December Graham agrees to talk to him. She seems tired and Aubrey can’t help but think that it’s just like when one is tired of waving mosquitoes away and lets one bite them and drink its fill.

“A controversial decision?” she says when the journalist asks about her orphans, feigning surprise. “How elitist.”

How elitist she says, but look at her goatskin gloves.

How elitist she says, and, in the evening, Aubrey polishes his leather shoes and recites Neruda’s poems in his head.

His father, who divides knowledge into useful and useless, wouldn’t appreciate Neruda, but Aubrey – although he’d never admit it to anyone like he’d admit to loving Bukowski or Plath or Elliot – appreciates it for the both of them, because, just then, _light is_

_halved_

_like_

_a_

_tomato,_

_its juice_

_runs_

_through the streets_

.

“So what do you expect from them, those orphans of yours?” the journalist asked eventually, his tea – and December must have served him tea – no doubt grown cold by then.

“I don’t expect anything from them,” December said to that, so much like Aubrey’s mother, so much not like her at all. “I just want to give them a chance.”

If someone asked Aubrey – and what a good thing it is indeed that no one ever does – he’d say that Easy deserves better than _a chance_.

Deserves—

Well, it’d be easier to name what he _doesn’t_ deserve.

*

When Jerusalem suggests they sneak out and get ice cream in the middle of February, Aubrey manages to grown a spine and keep it long enough to refuse. He’s buried in books and essays and something his father said to him over Christmas, how he’d be fine with Oxbridge if Aubrey couldn’t do any better than that, but he wouldn’t be fine with anything less.

“What’s better than Oxbridge anyway?” Regina asked when Aubrey told her about it, and she was the only one he did tell.

“Harvard?” he laughed, wondering if it sounded hysterical. He was so good at pretending composure when he first came to Wilgefortis. He was so good, and now…

“Is it?”

“I suppose it depends on the year.” Aubrey sighed. “I suppose he’d like me to skip ahead a few years and _then_ attend Oxbridge…”

“Aubrey,” Regina said, thoughtful. “What is it that you’d like to do?”

“It’s already decided, it’s going to be law—”

“What is it that _you_ ’d like to do?” Regina repeated stubbornly and put her head on his shoulder when Aubrey failed to answer. It took him three minutes to choke out ‘law’ and she did him the courtesy of letting it be even though they both knew it was a lie.

“Come on, you bore,” Jerusalem says now, sprawling on top of his notes to get him to pay attention to her, as is her way. “You’ll read when you retire.”

“I won’t live till retirement if you keep dragging me places and forcing me to climb trees,” Aubrey points out.

None of them know about the roof, or about the blanket Treasure keeps there, or about Easy’s set of nesting dolls that Aubrey hid inside one of the Wellingtons stuck up there.

(Aubrey doesn’t like to think about what Jerusalem – who always begins those things – would say if she knew. He doesn’t like to think about what Quickly – who always overreacts and often misunderstands – would say if _he_ knew.)

(Doesn’t like to think about what December Graham would _do_ if she knew.)

“Look, Aubrey,” Jerusalem says after a heavy, theatrical sigh. “You can’t just put on an ugly jumper, adjust your glasses, recite obscure sources, and call that personality.”

Aubrey blinks at her and sighs, leaning back in his chair. He doesn’t have time for this—

“Yes, he _can_ ,” Easy says, too loud for the library, and louder than anything he’s said so far this year. “Leave him alone, would you?”

Everyone turns to stare at him and Easy blushes under the attention but doesn’t stop glaring at Jerusalem.

Jerusalem smiled like the cat that got the cream, slides off the table without – thank God for small mercies – taking all of Aubrey’s notes with her, and rounds the table to circle Easy like he’s just-spotted prey.

“Ezra,” she says, the first sign that she’s plotting, and pinches his reddened cheeks. “How are you?”

“I dislike you,” Easy mumbles when she starts pulling on his skin, trying to bat her hands away. “Did I ever tell you that?”

“You say that daily, but I never believe you,” Jerusalem says with a shrug, and then turns to face Aubrey. “Easy always mopes when you don’t go with us.”

Easy makes a choked sound and goes even more red. “I do _not_.”

“Methinks the lady doth protest too much,” Kipp recites, just loud enough for everyone to catch it.

Jerusalem glares at Easy and pulls on his cheek again. “Can you cooperate and do your ‘miserable orphan’ act now, please?”

Easy tries to bite her finger but she moves her hand away in time. She stares at him with her mouth wide open. “Come on! I said please!”

“I’m not a _dog_!”

“Well, of course you’re not a dog! Dogs are cute and you… you’re like a paper shredder!”

“If I agree to go, will you all shut up?” Aubrey groans, rubbing his eyes under his glasses. 

“He must be really tired if he’s saying rude things like ‘shut up’” Kipp says, pretending to be scandalised. “My, my.”

Jerusalem steps on Kipp’s foot with a dazzling smile. “Of course we’ll shut up, comrade!”

“How very Bolshevik Revolution,” Regina says with a frown.

“I didn’t say ‘tovarish’, now, did I?” Jerusalem shoots back with an innocent shrug.

Aubrey sighs and closes his book, wondering why Easy went quiet so suddenly and not daring to turn his head to check.

*

“I just don’t find cobblestones charming!” Quickly says an hour later. “It has nothing to do with how often I trip over them, I’m not biased like that!”

“You have already tripped over them four times, though,” Kipp points out. “Maybe a little biased?”

“While we’re here, I’d like to visit the bookshop,” Aubrey says, adjusting his scarf. Regina made it for him over Christmas and it’s beyond lovely: it’s wine-red with the silhouettes of mountains sewed onto it in white thread, and it feels soft against his skin.

“I need some wool,” Regina says with a small nod. 

Jerusalem rolls her eyes. “We’re here for _ice cream_ , not to run errands like we’re married with three kids each!”

“Didn’t you say you needed some socks?” Kipp reminds her, amused.

“She does,” Regina confirms before Jerusalem can protest. “She rips _everything_. I don’t knit fast enough to make up the difference.”

Jerusalem points a shaking finger at her. “Et tu, Brute?!”

Kipp rolls his eyes and tugs on her elbow. “Come on, I’ll try on a dress for you and you’ll have even more blackmail material against me,” he says. “Quick, quick, before we’re both married with three kids and too old for things like that.”

“Easy?” Regina says, tilting her head in question.

“Aren’t you going with Aubrey?” Jerusalem asks, raising an eyebrow.

Easy glances at Aubrey and then shakes his head.

“He’ll go with me, won’t you?” Regina says with a smile. It takes him a second but Easy smiles back.

“I’ll go with you, then,” Quickly tells Aubrey. “Maybe they’ll have some books on plants.”

“Ice cream in an hour!” Jerusalem shouts, Kipp already dragging her away.

It’s a short walk to the local bookshop and Aubrey and Quickly spend it discussing the migratory patterns of geese. They’re almost there when Quickly stops and tugs on Aubrey’s sleeve until Aubrey does too. He smiles and points to the window of a small toyshop, the display full of colourful dolls on strings bathed in yellow light.

“Can we go in?” he asks, excited like a kid, and it’s so rare for him to smile this wide that Aubrey lets him pull him inside.

The shop is cluttered, the passage leading through the middle of it narrow like the passages between the Wilgefortis library’s bookcases. The clerk smiles at them over his copy of _Watership Down_ and Aubrey only realises how cold it is outside when he feels how warm it is in here.

“I wouldn’t have guessed that you’d like a place like this,” Aubrey says as Quickly reaches out to poke a Venetian mask hanging from the ceiling on a long string.

Quickly shrugs. “Nostalgia, or something. We should enjoy these before everything that’s not made of plastic goes out of production,” he says, waving his hand at rows of toys, all of them wooden and coated with paint that glistens like it’s never dried. “Do you think Treasure would like any of these?” he asks, pointing to small porcelain dolls laid out on a shelf. “I could leave it in her bag with an anonymous note? It’s Valentine’s Day tomorrow.”

Aubrey doesn’t have the heart to tell him that Treasure would surely know the present was from him. He wanders deeper into the shop, careful not to knock anything over, and gawks at puppets, metal cars, and music boxes set on the shelves, fabric spilling and tumbling to the floor, the place full of strings to get tangled in or trip over. Everything is expensive and Aubrey supposes that it must be very ‘in’ now to own old hand-me-downs that look like something straight out of _The Nutcracker_. He doesn’t remember ever wanting toys like these and doesn’t remember ever having them, either, but he feels nostalgic all the same.

Quickly says something but Aubrey doesn’t catch it, distracted by a porcelain figurine of Peter Pan, small enough that he could close his hand around it and make it disappear.

“The boy who wouldn’t grow up, hmm?” Quickly says, glancing at it over Aubrey’s shoulder. “Don’t tell me you want to buy it.”

Easy read _Peter Pan_ in between _Dead Souls_ and _Master and Margarita_ (“Oh, what? I need a break from the Russians, all right?”) and seemed to love it. He probably wouldn’t admit it aloud, but he was always giggling over the library copy, turning the pages so fast Aubrey thought they’d rip and then going back to reread some of them right away.

“I think he wouldn’t go with you to the bookshop because he doesn’t have money,” Quickly says as if he’s reading Aubrey’s mind. “Of course, he couldn’t say so, because then we’d all offer to lend him some, and he’d never agree to _that_.”

“You think he won’t accept it,” Aubrey guesses.

Quickly shakes his head. “He’s weird about accepting things, isn’t he? Sometimes he will, without a word, and sometimes… He _has_ been acting strange lately, especially around you.”

Aubrey sighs, closing his fingers around the Peter Pan figurine. It disappears, just like he suspected it would. “I don’t know what I did.”

“I don’t know that you _did_ something,” Quickly says, reaching out to poke a Captain Hook figurine. “I say it’s worth a try. The worst that can happen, he’ll complain and refuse to accept it.”

“That’s a pretty bad worst-case scenario.”

“Is it?” Quickly asks, watching Aubrey with an unreadable expression. “He’s a hoarder at heart, so I really don’t think he’ll protest that much.”

Aubrey smiles and heads to the front of the room. When they get to the counter, the clerk looks up from his book and smiles.

“Should I wrap it like a gift?” he asks, taking the figurine from Aubrey. “It doesn’t cost extra.”

“Please,” Quickly says when Aubrey can’t quite find the words to confirm himself. The clerk glances up at him and his smile widens when he catches sight of Aubrey’s expression.

“Oh, is it for a girlfriend?” he teases. Aubrey frowns, wondering what made him think that.

“No, he’s— she’s— _he’s_ — No girlfriend.”

At his side, Quickly sniggers into his sleeve.

“Oh, a he?” the clerk says, rummaging in the desk drawer until he finds a pair of scissors. “That’s fine too, why not.”

Aubrey opens his mouth to protest but then the clerk starts mumbling something about tissue paper and doesn’t stop until the figurine is packed, ribbon and all. Aubrey decides that there’s no point clarifying anything now and pays, exchanging a quiet thanks with the clerk.

“Well, that sure was something,” Quickly says once they’ve stepped outside. “Don’t worry, I’m sure your boyfriend will love it.”

Aubrey groans and puts the figurine in his pocket, wondering why the clerk didn’t ask before wrapping it in paper _covered with red hearts_.

When they get to the only decent café in Bullford half an hour later, Kipp and Jerusalem are already there, the former blowing on his fingers and the latter frowning at the menu.

“Hazelnut or pistachio?” Jerusalem mumbles when they join them at the table.

“Hot chocolate,” Kipp sighs, rubbing his palms together. “ _Boiling_ hot.”

“Hey, listen to this,” Quickly says, pulling his chair closer to the table and leaning over it until he has Kipp and Jerusalem’s attention. “We went to this toyshop and Aubrey got Easy this small porcelain figurine—”

“Did he?” Kipp says, eyebrows going up, up.

“—And the clerk thought Easy was his boyfriend and wrapped it in this Valentine’s Day paper,” Quickly goes on as Aubrey prays for quick and painless death next to him. “He was like ‘oh, a _he_? That’s fine, sure, why not.’”

Jerusalem laughs, but Kipp only leans back in his chair until Aubrey thinks it’ll topple backward, and stares at Aubrey like he’s waiting for something.

 _I have nothing for you_ , Aubrey thinks helplessly. _Nothing at all._

“I suggest that you don’t mention this to Easy,” Kipp says eventually, eyes sharp.

“Why not?” Quickly says, glancing between them with a frown. “It was just a misunderstanding. It’s _funny_.”

“It is,” Jerusalem confirms. “I laughed.”

Kipp smiles without looking away from Aubrey. “You know Easy. He’s… sensitive. And what with everything they say about him at school…”

Aubrey frowns. “Everything they say about him? Who’s they and what are they saying?”

“Oh, well, you know _. Words_. Fairy, nancy, all that,” Kipp says with a shrug. “They’d call Francis here these things too if they knew he exists.”

“ _Hey_!” Quickly squeaks in protest.

“People say that at school?” Aubrey demands, feeling cold even though it’s warm inside the café and he’s still wearing his coat. “Who?”

Kipp doesn’t roll his eyes, doesn’t shake his head, doesn’t smile. “ _Everyone_ , Aubrey. It’d do you well to consider not spending your whole life with your nose buried in a book, maybe then you’d notice things.”

Aubrey ignores the jab. “Why would anyone say that about him?”

Kipp frowns at him, something icy about his gaze. “ _Why_? They don’t need a why, Aubrey. Someone’s too blond or not blond enough, someone’s too short or too tall… It’s enough that he looks like—”

“Puck?” Jerusalem suggests.

“Sure, like Puck,” Kipp says with an indulgent smile. “So don’t mention that exchange to him, hmm, Francis?”

“Sure,” Quickly mumbles.

“Thank you,” Kipp says sweetly, and only looks away from Aubrey when the door to the café opens, bringing a gust of wind inside.

“I have enough wool to last me months,” Regina announces as she grabs two extra chairs and drags them over to their table.

“I helped her pick colours for your Easter socks,” Easy tells them, curls wild and cheeks pink. “Do try to contain your excitement.”

“Are we still having ice cream?” Regina says, reaching for a menu. “Because, to be honest, I’m dying for—”

“Hot chocolate?” Kipp guesses. “I’ll order.”

Aubrey closes his hand around the small package inside his coat pocket and doesn’t look at Easy until they leave an hour later. He only sneaks a glance as they’re walking home and it starts snowing, watching the flakes settle on Easy’s curls, and why would anyone…?

“I’m sorry,” he tells Kipp later, when they’re back at school, their soaked socks drying on the heat radiator.

“Don’t apologise,” Kipp sighs. “Do something, all right? This isn’t _Snow Queen_.”

That night, Aubrey thinks about the boy who followed the Snow Queen and forgot all about his friend Gerda, and doesn’t sleep.

*

“Do people ever bother you?” Aubrey asks Bessie the next day as he catches up with her before dinner.

“You _have_ seen me, right?” Bessie says, staring at him with wide eyes as she waves her hand at herself. “99.9% of kids that go here are rich and white. Of course people bother me.”

“You should let someone know,” Aubrey insists, trying to think of a way to make this right. It feels misguided, this hope that he could ever be significant enough to succeed. 

“Nobody cares.”

“December Graham cares.”

“Does she?” Bessie says, adjusting her bag on her bony shoulder, and why are they all so _bony_? “There are things she doesn’t see. It’s not her fault, or is it.”

“Bessie—”

“If this is about Ezra, he better not learn you think he can’t handle himself,” Bessie warns him. “He’d kill you to death if he did.”

Aubrey sighs, frustrated. “Look—”

“I’m not looking,” Bessie says, shaking her head. “I like you. You’re polite and you comb your hair. That’s more than can be said about the majority of boys here.”

“Where are you going with this?”

“There are things you don’t see because you’re not looking,” Bessie tells him with an almost pitying smile, “but there are things you don’t see because Ezra doesn’t want you to see them.”

“Well, tough, because from now on—”

Bessie climbs to her tiptoes and folds her hand over Aubrey’s mouth to silence him.

“just being there is enough,” she whispers, like it’s a secret. “So just be there.”

“Be where?” Aubrey asks hopelessly when she takes her hand away, but she’s already gone, skipping down the hallway and humming about how she’s saved the world today, the bad thing’s gone away, the good thing’s here to stay…

 _If only_ , Aubrey thinks, watching her go. _If only._

*

Easy’s drawing mania continues and he gets through his pencils, crayons, and pastels without anyone getting so much as a glimpse of what it is he’s so busy sketching over and over.

“Because it _must_ be the same thing over and over,” Jerusalem insists. “Otherwise, he’d show us _some_ thing.”

“Maybe it’s vaginas,” Kipp says, waggling his eyebrows.

“I don’t think it’s vaginas,” Quickly says with a skeptical frown.

“Privacy,” Regina reminds them. “Boundaries.”

Aubrey, for his part, tries to ‘be there’, but it’s hard to be there for someone who’s always busy and keeps disappearing. Easy still stares at him sometimes, but not as often as he used to in the first semester, and there are days when Aubrey only sees him in class.

“You still haven’t given him the figurine?” Quickly asks in disbelief when he finds it inside Aubrey’s shoe while cleaning their room, even though Aubrey’s shoes are where they’re supposed to be, thank you very much. “You’ve gotten rid of the wrapping paper, so what’s the issue?”

Aubrey doesn’t know what’s the issue but, at the end of February, he stuffs the figurine in the same Wellington where he hid Easy’s nesting dolls over a year ago now as he waits for Treasure Little to join him up on the roof, now that ‘everything doesn’t hurt anymore’.

He’s taken to looking for Easy and, each evening, he checks the library, the bathrooms, and the dark nooks behind sculptures, but he’s yet to be successful in his search. 

“It’s like he disappears into thin air,” he tells Regina one afternoon when she dips a finger in his tea to check how long he’s had it there without drinking it.

It’s almost March when Easy finally comes to him instead of going AWOL after dinner.

“I need your help,” he says, playing with his fingers.

“My help?” Aubrey repeats, like an idiot.

Easy frowns and takes it the wrong way, because of course he does. “Well, Quickly would never do something like that for me, Kipp and Jerusalem would just make fun of me, and Regina— I don’t want her to worry.”

 _I worry too_ , is what Aubrey thinks first.

 _Since when am I the last resort?_ , he thinks next.

“Yes? What can I do?”

“I need you to check something for me,” Easy says, a blush spreading from the bridge of his nose and across his cheeks. “It’s something Small said the other day.”

Aubrey sighs, steeling himself. “Yeah? What did he say this time?”

For a second, Easy looks so miserable that Aubrey fully expects him to leave without a word and never mention it – whatever ‘it’ is – again.

Then Easy takes a deep breath and tells him.

“He says I have lice.”

Aubrey blinks at him and has enough sense not to ask for repetition. “You don’t,” he says. “Easy, you don’t.”

“How do _you_ know?” Easy asks, distrustful.

Aubrey sighs. “Does your head itch?”

“No,” Easy says with a frown. “Maybe they’re just not hungry.”

“Your imaginary lice?”

“If you’re going to be making fun of me, I might as well ask Kipp after all—”

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” Aubrey says hurriedly. “Sit.”

Easy settles next to him on the couch and glares. “You think I’m being ridiculous.”

Aubrey smiles. “You’re being very… Quickly.”

Easy – Hallelujah – smiles back. He crosses his legs and settles with his back to Aubrey and— Right. His hair. Aubrey is supposed to touch it. In order to check it for lice. He has to—Has to touch it.

“You can wear gloves if you want?” Easy says. He sounds uncertain, and Aubrey curses himself.

“You don’t have lice,” he repeats, reaching forward to part Easy’s curls.

“Just check it _carefully_ ,” Easy insists, tilting his head when Aubrey guides it with his hand. With his hand, which is shaking, and God, _why_ is his hand shaking? Easy’s hair is softer than it has any right to be, and, at one point, Aubrey gets distracted following the way a lock of it coils with his finger and forgets about checking for lice for a second or two. Or twenty.

“Done,” he announces after two minutes of a more-or-less thorough examination. “No lice.”

“Are you _sure_ though?” Easy says, a doubtful note in his voice. “Because I think I saw something moving there in the mirror this morning—”

“Maybe it was a spider?” Aubrey suggests, flexing his fingers. “Lice aren’t big enough to spot in the mirror, I don’t think.”

Easy squeaks. “Well, check it for spiders then!”

“I’m pretty sure I did,” Aubrey says, but he does start parting Easy’s hair again. He leans back against the arm of the couch and brushes his fingers through the locks to check if they’ll catch on something and, wondering how long he’ll have to do this for exactly for Easy to be satisfied.

It’s not that he _minds_ , but his hands are still shaking and maybe he shouldn’t have drunk instant coffee earlier…

(Mostly, he minds how much he doesn’t mind.)

“Why would you believe Jonathan Small anyway?” he sighs at one point. “He’s always saying things like that.”

“He’s not the only one who says—” Easy stops abruptly, the tips of his ears going pink. “Orphanages have a _reputation_.”

“You never cared before.”

“Didn’t I?” Easy says, so quiet that Aubrey almost misses it. “I’m cold. Aren’t you cold?”

Aubrey glances at the fireplace five feet away but doesn’t mention it.

“It’s because you’re so skinny,” he says, giving Easy’s hair the gentlest tug. Easy seems to catch on and scoots backward until he’s leaning half on the back of the couch and half on Aubrey’s chest. “You’ve missed dinner two days in a row.”

“Regina packs it up for me and leaves it on my desk.”

“Nuh-uh,” Aubrey laughs. “Kipp saw you feeding it to birds.”

“Traitor,” Easy grumbles, turning his head until his nose is pressed to the back of the couch. He yawns and goes limp, slumping against Aubrey. “I do eat.”

“The ends of your pencils don’t count,” Aubrey says quietly, rubbing his fingers into Easy’s skull. Easy sighs, so Aubrey does it again, and then keeps doing it when Easy hums in approval. 

“They do, too,” Easy insists sleepily. “Cellulose.”

Aubrey laughs and trails the edge of his nail behind Easy’s ear. Easy gasps, wriggles, and then goes suspiciously still.

“You know that we don’t digest cellulose, right?” Aubrey says, flicking his ear.

“What?” Easy mumbles, sounding like he’s miles away.

“Cellulose,” Aubrey repeats. “We don’t digest it.”

“We don’t?” Easy whispers. “That’s a shame.”

Aubrey laughs again and goes on brushing his fingers through Easy’s hair and massaging his scalp. He only realises that he hasn’t been checking it for lice at all after a few minutes have passed.

“I think you’re good,” he tells Easy, feeling embarrassed and not knowing why. “Easy?”

He tilts his head until he can see Easy’s face and sighs when he sees that Easy’s fallen asleep. He looks exhausted, the shadows beneath his eyes stark against his pale skin like he hasn’t slept in days.

“That’s because he hasn’t,” Kipp says suddenly.

Aubrey startles and looks up. Kipp’s leaning over them with his arms folded over the back of the couch and watching them with an amused smile.

“I didn’t mean to say that aloud,” Aubrey mumbles. “Why wouldn’t he be sleeping?”

“He’s been saying it for months, Aubrey,” Kipp scolds, reaching down to flick his nose. “He’s got a lot on his mind, etc. etc.”

“Oh.”

Kipp sighs, rolls his eyes, and rounds the couch.

“You’re doing it all wrong,” he says critically, staring down at them with pursed lips.

“Doing what wrong?”

“You’re being a poor pillow,” Kipp explains, tilting his head. “Here.”

Aubrey doesn’t protest when Kipp starts rearranging them for fear of waking Easy. He lets Kipp manoeuvre his arm until it’s circling Easy’s waist and adjust both their heads until Easy’s rests in the crook of Aubrey’s shoulder and until Aubrey’s chin rests on top of it. He watches silently as Kipp carefully un-pretzels Easy’s legs and stretches them out along the couch and allows it when Kipp does the same for him.

“See?” Kipp says once he’s done, hands on hips. “Much better.”

“Sure,” Aubrey agrees, not wanting to argue. “Could you pass me my book?”

Kipp grins. “Oh, no. No, I don’t think so. It’s better if you have nothing to distract you.”

“Distract me from _what_?” Aubrey asks, confused.

Kipp sighs and leaves him there without deigning to reply. Aubrey sighs and glances down at the top of Easy’s head, where his curls are a tangled mess. Something goes painfully tight inside him, and it’d make sense if it was his stomach because he barely touched his dinner himself, but he feels it higher, like it’s his heart.

Because there’s nothing else to do, Aubrey tries to relax and tells himself Neruda poems, a line for each of Easy’s slow exhales.

_Don't go far off, not even for a day, because --_

_because -- I don't know how to say it: a day is long_

_and I will be waiting for you, as in an empty station_

_when the trains are parked off somewhere else, asleep._

“Winter will be over soon,” he whispers into Easy’s hair once he runs out of lines. “I promise.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The poems are Neruda's _Ode To Tomatoes_ (shsh, he makes it work) and _Don't Go Far Off._
> 
> Thank you for reading! Take care everyone <3


	7. scheherazade, february 2001

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> a surprise at first sight

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay so! This introduces new characters (one of them is a month character and one was mentioned a few times but never actually appeared in the story before this) and there's a bunch of references to not-yet-disclosed past events, again, but bear with me, I'll explain things super soon! (did i really just write 'super soon' though....) 
> 
> ALSO! Merry Christmas to everyone who celebrates and a happy week to everyone who doesn't! I love you all <3

Nicoletta Ceccoli, _The Uninvited_

*

maybe

like the dog obedient at my heels, we can walk together

peacefully, at least until the next truck comes.

~Ada Limón, _The Leash_

*

“Mr. MacKinnon?”

His eyes widen when he spots her and he blushes, too. It takes him a moment to compose himself and remember his English, but she’s long outgrown being irritated by surprise and finds it charming instead.

“Hello,” he says finally, smiling down at her. “Can I help you?”

She returns the smile. “I’m an old friend of your wife’s.”

“May’s friend?” he asks as his whole face brightens. “How lovely.”

She extends her hand. “Florence.”

“I’ve never been,” he says, and it’s not _funny_ , but it’s— It’s something. He stares at her hand a beat too long, as though he’s not sure whether he should shake it or kiss it, and ends up gently curling his own around it for a second – two – before letting go. “Er, May’s not with me, I’m afraid.”

“Oh, I know. I’m actually here to talk to _you_ , Mr.—”

“How about Benjamin?” he interrupts, frowning at the title. “Benjamin’s fine.”

He’s not what she expected, and they’re only a few sentences in. He’s yet to ask her how she knew to find him here, for one, and this sort of naïveté is a rare thing indeed. Florence would have thought it a flaw, once, but then, she would have thought many qualities flaws, once.

“A birthday present for May?” she asks, pointing to the wrapped frame he’s holding under his arm. “I’m sure she’ll love it whatever you picked.”

He rubs the back of his neck in a bashful gesture and glances at the building where the collection is being held over his shoulder. The author is some young girl fresh out of school who ‘knows the sky like the back of her hand’ as the article Florence read about it last week proclaimed.

“I’m getting her paints, too,” Benjamin MacKinnon says, already wincing at his own clumsiness. “Er, so, to what do I owe the pleasure?”

She smiles again, and she’s never been particularly charming but, just this once, she tries her best. “How about coffee?”

*

It’s a little awkward to manoeuvre the wheelchair inside the café but Benjamin MacKinnon – who Florence expected to be clumsy in this as well – makes quick work of shoving chairs aside and winning people over with smiles until they move out of the way, and she’s settled by the window in no time.

“I do so hate London,” Florence sighs once they’ve ordered their coffees, trying not to be charmed by how he ordered double caramel in his.

“The air pollution?” he guesses, and oh. Oh, how delightful.

“The crowds,” she laughs, patting the side of the wheelchair. “But sure, air pollution as well.”

He blushes to the very roots of his hair and Florence feels sudden frustration at how carelessly May picked him: he’d look like her brother rather than a husband, only the yellow of his hair is that bit warmer and his skin that bit more alive.

 _Dresden dolls, all of them_ , she can’t help but think even now.

“I hate the crowded streets myself,” he says with a nod, but his eyes widen in horror right away. “Not that I’m implying it’s as bad for me as it is for you! I mean, obviously — oh, _Jesus_.”

Florence steeples her fingers and places her chin on top of them as she smiles at him with patience. A few sips of coffee, and then she’ll stop the small talk. Just a few sips.

“So how do you know May?” he asks once their drinks have arrived. “Childhood friends?”

“Oh, yes,” – a sip. – “There was a whole group of us,” – and another. – “Twelve, actually,” – and another.

She doesn’t miss it when he goes still, even though he was already quite still before.

“Excuse me?”

“I think you heard me,” she says, trying to sound polite.

He sighs and presses his fingers to his temples. “I should have—”

“—realised?” she guesses, taking another sip of her coffee.

“It’s just that you don’t seem like someone who’d get mixed up in… You seem too…”

“Disabled?”

“Nice,” he corrects. “ _Nice_.”

“I _am_ nice,” she insists. “That’s why I’m here.”

He gives her an appraising look, glances left and right, and then scoots closer to the table.

“Here’s the thing,” Florence says, “May is like a sister to me. A younger one, even though I’m number four.”

“April, you mean?”

“Number four,” she insists. “She’s like a sister to me, but we haven’t talked in years. She hates me, you see.”

“Does she have a good reason?” Benjamin MacKinnon asks, not so naïve after all.

Here’s the tricky part. Here’s where she might lose him.

“Yes,” she says, the word that bit too flat.

“Then I’m not sure I can help you,” he says, and oh, he even sounds genuinely apologetic about it. She feels like she knows him already, like she has seen it every time he opened the door for someone, which must have been _every_ time.

“Not _me_ ,” she says, reaching out to curl her fingers around his tie before he can lean back and be miles away. “It’s May who needs help.”

He stares down at her hand fisted around the silk, and his eyes soften in— oh, but what business does he have pitying her for having chapped knuckles when he’s given no indication of pitying her for being in the chair so far?

“I think you’ve misunderstood the nature of mine and May’s relationship, A— Florence.”

“No, I haven’t,” she insists. “Just because she’s not in love with you, that doesn’t mean you’re not in love with her.”

He smiles, wry. “She’d laugh if she heard you say that.”

“Yes, she’s oblivious like that,” Florence sighs, slowly letting go of the tie. She refuses the urge to smooth down the fabric. “She thinks you’re never home because you have better things to do, when, in fact, you’re never home because you _want_ to be.”

He shakes his head with an amused smile but doesn’t deny it. Florence clears her throat. “Anyway, rumour has it May’s no longer Switzerland.”

His eyes instantly go sharp at that. “She’s not?”

“Hidey-holes only work with January when one doesn’t stick their nose out, not even once,” Florence says, folding her hands in her lap. “A man was killed last year, did you know?”

“What man?”

“Irrelevant,” Florence says, even though it isn’t. “Here’s what happened: January had me watch you for a while but it was just a formality because he was convinced you and May didn’t love each other. I know better by now but I haven’t told him that. I know better by now because if you didn’t love her, you wouldn’t get her a painting. You’d get her roses.”

“She likes roses, May,” he points out.

“She likes paintings better.”

“So you’re supposed to be a spy?” he asks with an incredulous frown. “And we’re having coffee?”

“How very… James Bond,” she says, shaking her head. “This was January’s idea. He figured I could bump into you and start a conversation, which would turn into coffee, which would turn into more coffee, which would turn into an affair…”

“An _affair_?” he repeats, eyes grown huge. “Do I really seem like an affair type of person to you?”

Of course it’s that and not ‘why would he send _you_ to seduce me when you can’t even—’

_Of course._

“An affair,” she repeats. “An affair, and then news of May, and then access to your house, and then access to her things when you wouldn’t be looking… And you wouldn’t ever suspect me of trying to be stealthy because, well, the chair.”

He blinks at her and rubs his temples again. “And you’re telling me this why?”

“Because I don’t want her to get hurt,” Florence says. “Because I’m on her side even if she’s not on mine.”

“So…?”

She smiles. “So I’ll be Scheherazade. We’ll meet every now and then, I’ll report getting closer to you to January, and, in the meantime, I’ll try thinking of something to get May to listen to me. It’ll gain us time, at the very least.”

“With all due respect—”

“Oh, really?”

“Doesn’t sound like much of a plan,” he sighs. “And why should I trust you anyway?”

“Ah,” Florence breathes. “I thought this would come up.”

He raises his eyebrows and then squeaks when she puts her foot in his lap under the table.

“I can move my legs,” Florence says, amused.

“Right,” he mumbles. “But why would you move them, er, there?”

“May’s ankle tattoo,” Florence tells him, tapping her heel above his knee. “Have you ever seen it?”

“Number four,” he admits grudgingly.

“Peel my sock down,” Florence instructs. “Come on.”

“This is really—”

“Necessary,” she insists. “Necessary beats inappropriate.”

He sighs but grabs her foot by the ankle, slides his fingers up the hem of her trouser leg, and slowly – almost _too_ slowly – peels the sock down.

“Do you understand?”

He seems to forget himself and brushes his thumb over the tattooed 5 there.

“I think I do,” he whispers before pulling the sock back up for her and patting her ankle twice as if to say ‘there.’ “This is madness.”

“You’ll get used to it,” she assures him, downing her coffee.

“You’ll have to tell me why May doesn’t speak to you,” he says with concern, because – Florence is starting to understand – that’s just what he’s like. 

“Of course,” Florence agrees easily. “Next time? I’m afraid I have to run now.”

It’s rather hopeless how his eyes drift to the wheelchair at that.

“A figure of speech,” she reminds him, and oh, how he blushes.

*

“It _is_ the most convoluted story I’ve ever heard of but I think he bought it,” she tells January an hour later, sprawled on his softest couch, propped up with his fluffiest pillows.

“Told you,” he says with a grin, dragging her feet into his lap. “It’s a good thing the tattoo healed in time.”

“Isn’t it?” she sighs happily, melting into the pillows. “What a stupid man, this MacKinnon.”

“Little Flo,” January says with a grin. “Thank the devil he didn’t know what May’s 4 stands for.”

Florence presses her nail to her thumb, digs in. May’s 4 isn’t April for Florence, but rather April for ‘I met December in spring’.

“Thank the devil,” she agrees. There are things she owes May, but she owes January more. She loves May, even, but she—

“Here’s to us,” she says, reaching for their drinks and clinking the glasses together before passing him his. He smiles, and it’s his most private yet: the one no one has ever seen but her.

No one but her and December, of course.

“Here’s to us,” he echoes, tapping her tattoo with his finger. Earlier, Benjamin MacKinnon’s hand was cold, but now it seems like she must have gotten it wrong because this – _this_ is cold.

“I hate London,” she sighs, tilting her head back until she can stare out the window.

“The crowds?” January says, as sympathetic as he ever gets.

She smiles even though he won’t see it because this one’s just for her. “Air pollution.”


	8. come september, april-june 2001

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> the one wherein one of them finally gets it

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> oh my god,i'm so sorry guys this chapter is probably bad and has typos but :''') I need to finish writing a novel before the end of the year, which is, you know, three days from now, haha. I also have to finish writing this before the end of the year, which I will, but
> 
> (I swear, my 2021 new year's resolution is to not have new year's resolutions)

Denis Sarazhin, _Pantomime No. 5_

(https://www.pinterest.co.uk/pin/545639311087044604/)

*

and sometimes He is there and sometimes He is not

because you cannot eat the ones you love

~Torey Akers, _How to Recover Touch, An Anti-Infographic_

*

Easy’s drawing mania stops in April, and it stops because Lavinia Pye discovers what it is he’s been drawing.

The thing with Lavinia is tricky because Lavinia still seems angry with Regina, so whenever Aubrey talks to her, he feels disloyal. He keeps remembering how he wrote ‘integrity’ on Regina’s paper back in first year, and wishes he had some himself.

Regina, when he breached the subject with her, told him that he was being stupid.

“I don’t mind you talking to her, Aubrey,” she said as they walked down the corridor, and then she stopped mid-step and frowned. “What I mind is her not talking to me.”

Aubrey wouldn’t say that he understands finding Lavinia’s company desirable, per se, but he had enough empathy to nod along and say something about how she would talk to Regina again come new school year for sure.

The end of the world as they know it starts like this:

They’re at dinner and Easy is busy drawing, plate shoved aside. His sketchbook is spread on his knees, shielded from view, and his meatballs are growing cold, untouched. Kipp was awfully pleased with himself when he managed to drag Easy to the dining room, but he’s far from pleased now, glaring at the sauce on Easy’s plate like it’s all its fault and like he thinks Easy would eat if only the food was that bit nicer.

“It’s like he’s in a trance,” Jerusalem says, impressed. “I’ve been throwing crust at him for ten minutes now.”

“Yes, we know,” Quickly groans. “It’s all over his hair.”

Kipp reaches across the table to pick one piece out of Easy’s hair and pluck it into his mouth. Easy doesn’t even look up.

“It’s like a superpower,” Jerusalem says, making grabby hands. “I want it for myself.”

“The superpower to ignore your surroundings?” Kipp makes sure. “You don’t need it, do you? You do whatever you want anyway.”

“I want to hit you now, but I’m refraining,” Jerusalem says with a sweet smile.

“I wouldn’t refrain if I were you,” Lavinia says, appearing at their table with a crate full of plums. “Two each, no cheating.”

“Can I have Easy’s?” Jerusalem says, clapping her hands together. “He won’t even know you were here.”

“He’ll get scurvy,” Lavinia mumbles, staring at him with a displeased frown. “What is he sketching anyway?”

“Nobody knows,” Jerusalem says, spreading her hands and drawing a bow in the air. “It’s a mystery.”

“Hold this,” Lavinia orders, placing the crate in Kipp’s arms before he can protest. She rounds the table, approaches Easy, and—

And suddenly he’s aware of his surroundings again, snapping the sketchbook closed before she can take a peek.

“Interesting,” Lavinia decides, hands on hips. “Would you be amenable to a bribe?”

Easy scowls at her. “Are you asking me if trying to bribe me would work?”

“I’ll take that as a yes,” Lavinia says, nodding her head. “How about three thousand?”

“Pounds!?” Easy says, eyes growing wide.

Lavinia rolls her eyes. “No, three thousand drachmas. _Yes_ , pounds. Keep up.”

“I’m not interested,” Easy says with a pained expression. “Now if you’d kindly—”

But there’s nothing kind about it when Lavinia rips the sketchbook out of his hands and holds it out of reach.

“Now, what _have_ you been drawing the whole year, it’s unnerving to say the least,” she says, opening it above her head like a small tent as Easy scrambles to his feet, chair collapsing to the ground with a loud thud. “Really, I’m sure whatever it is isn’t that bad, unless it’s pornography you’re hiding in he— _oh_.”

Easy, who was clearly about to tackle her, freezes. Lavinia freezes too, and, for a moment, they look like sculptures, caught in motion and perfectly still. Then, oh-so-slowly, Lavinia folds the sketchbook closed and presses it to her chest, like she doesn’t want anyone to snatch it away. She spares them all a glance and, if Aubrey didn’t know any better, he’d think that there’s something careful about how her eyes never settle on him.

He does know better. Eyes hardly ever settle on him, so.

“Don’t,” Easy says in this small, pathetic voice. “Oh, don’t!”

Everyone’s quiet, watching them with focus, and then Kipp’s meatball falls off his fork and everything restarts as though someone has snapped their fingers.

“We should go,” Lavinia says, stepping forward and grabbing Easy by the wrist. “Come on, let’s _go_.”

She drags a somewhat dazed Easy away, still cradling his sketchbook close.

“Well, that certainly was something,” Kipp says after a drawn-out whistle. “So, does this mean we get to keep all the plums to ourselves?”

*

“To paint is to love,” December Graham greets him when Aubrey stops by her office that week. “Do you like April, Aubrey?”

Aubrey glances out the window, at all the green.

April means two more months. April means, _no_.

“People don’t always love what they’re painting, do they?” he asks her because there’s a scar he’s been worrying into the meat of his palm with his fingernail over the past few weeks, one he’s ashamed of. It’s a ‘what are you drawing that’s so important and why isn’t it me’ scar, and he’s learned to curl his hand so no one – especially Aubrey himself – will see.

*

Easy and Lavinia quickly become inseparable, always together like Siamese twins. She’ll whisper in his ear, he’ll whisper in hers, and, more often than not, they’ll just sit in companionable silence, more comfortable than anything Aubrey and Easy ever shared.

Sometimes, Aubrey remembers his fingers in Easy’s hair and almost regrets that it ever happened. It seems impossibly cruel of the world, that it’d only happen once.

When he and Regina spot Lavinia in the corridor one morning, for once sans Easy, Regina calls out her name and then slaps a hand over her mouth as though she didn’t mean to let it slip out.

Lavinia stops and turns around, waiting for them to catch up with a scowl on her face.

“Well?” she says once they do, arching an eyebrow and adjusting her books – all by Iris Murdoch.

Regina takes a deep breath, which is unlike her, and then smiles.

“Be careful with him,” she says softly, reaching out to adjust a book that was about to slip out of Lavinia’s hold for her. Her fingers linger there, and Lavinia blinks down at them, surprised.

“I can be good to people, you know,” she says, and it comes out sadder than anything Aubrey’s heard her say this year. “I could be good to you.”

Regina stares at her with an unreadable expression, and then she smiles at her shoes.

“You weren’t,” she mumbles. “You aren’t.”

“No,” Lavinia admits. “I’m stupid instead.”

“You can’t be stupid _to_ people,” Aubrey points out before he can think better of it.

“Oh, but you can,” Lavinia laughs, blinking at him like she forgot he was there. “Oh, how you can.”

*

So Easy spends his days with Lavinia and Aubrey spends his days up on the roof with Treasure, and April rolls over into a rainy May, the ground soft like a sponge and first-years looking for frogs in puddles.

“But aren’t you worried about him?” Aubrey asks Bessie one day as they watch Easy sleepily spread butter on his hand rather than on the piece of toast he’s holding.

“He’s going to be fine,” Bessie says seriously. “I’m not going to let anything happen to him.”

But why would anything happen to him, Aubrey doesn’t ask. He thinks it, though. He spends the whole day thinking it, and another part of his mind spends the whole day answering.

*

“I don’t know, I don’t care, don’t ask _me_ ,” Kipp says with a shrug when Aubrey asks him if he knows what’s up with Easy. “For what it’s worth, whatever’s happening – and even if I did know, why should I… -- for what it’s worth, I don’t think he’d want you to know. I don’t think he’d want _anyone_ to know.”

*

And then the worst happens:

Easy balls up one of his sketches in class in obvious frustration and the rustling of the paper is loud enough to draw attention. December Graham looks up and crosses the room towards him, curious.

“Why, that just won’t do,” she says, shaking her head in disappointment. “You can’t destroy art, no matter how bad.”

“It’s _bad_ ,” Easy sighs, shoving it aside and clearly waiting for December to go back to the front of the classroom.

But December Graham – the kind benefactress who’s supposed to be on Easy’s side – smiles expectantly and holds out her hand. Easy glances at the ball of paper, and then back up at her, and the betrayal spilling all over his face is so cruel that Aubrey almost looks away to give him privacy, now December’s denying it to him.

Almost.

Easy doesn’t move and December sighs. She starts reaching for the paper but Lavinia, who leans out of her desk, is quicker: she snatches the ball a second before December’s fingers would graze it and shoves it in her mouth.

December blinks at her, surprised, and then narrows her eyes. Lavinia arches an eyebrow. December crosses her arms and tilts her head like she’s about to try and wait Lavinia out. Lavinia crosses her own arms and starts chewing.

The silence is so absolute that you could hear a pin drop, not that anyone would dare drop one.

“You’re dismissed,” December says to the whole class even though they still have ten minutes of the lesson left, never looking away from Lavinia.

Lavinia smiles, salutes, and keeps chewing, and that’s when Aubrey understands: Wilgefortis might be special, but when push comes to shove, Lavinia has money, and so she can. Easy doesn’t have a penny to his name, and so he can’t.

 _What have you done_ , Aubrey thinks, staring at December Graham in horror. _Why would you let him see that it matters?_

He thinks of a way to fix it but one look at Easy’s face is enough to confirm his worst fears: the damage is already done.

*

Aubrey looks and looks and looks and Dora Maar doesn’t change, still the same, still there.

To love is to have. To love is to look. To love is to paint.

What about touching?

It’s early June when Aubrey finds himself thinking about it: say he climbed a chair, say he reached out, say he, with his fingers—

But no. It’d be too ugly. Too profane. Touch translates to expectations, met or not, and it’s expectations that always ruin love.

*

But isn’t painting touch?, he wonders as he doesn’t sleep at night. Isn’t drawing?

(What has Easy been—)

*

And slowly, the drawing mania comes to an end, and slowly, Easy stops staring, and slowly--

*

“Three years done,” Jerusalem says to him when school ends, leaning forward to land a loud, smacking kiss on his cheek. “Two more to go.”

“Two more to go,” Aubrey echoes and oh, how will he survive a whole summer without them?

“Shsh,” Jerusalem says as though he’s said it out loud, and presses a thumb to the corner of his mouth. “Shsh or I’ll steal a pin from Regina and put it here so you’ll have no choice but to smile.”

And then she’s gone, jumping into her parents’ car and driving away, three whole months away.

“Come on,” Kipp says when he finds Aubrey standing there on gravel, staring at where the car is no longer. “The bus will leave without us.”

Later, as they’re waiting for the train on the crowded platform, Aubrey stares at Easy’s profile and thinks that not seeing Easy for three months is going to feel like not seeing him for three years. There was distance there, these past few months, and it made Aubrey fond of how it’d been earlier: their scarves tangling on the floor, snow-wet, even when their limbs wouldn’t. Later, the last of cold took the last of touch with it and they wouldn’t wear enough layers for Aubrey to discover a stray black hair stuck to a sleeve or a pocket in the evenings.

It’s what he likes about cold: how it forces closeness, how one doesn’t have to ask for it in winter. 

But at least there’s this, a train full of compartments to share, something for the road. Aubrey’s been waiting for it, patient about exams and essays and law books from his father when other kids would get candy, putting all his hopes in this one train-ride.

Only it all goes wrong because they don’t find an empty compartment and they have to split up. Aubrey ends up sharing his with Kipp, Quickly, and some kids he doesn’t know, Regina and Easy down the corridor.

“Cards?” Kipp says to the kids, even though they’re first-years, for God’s sake. “I think poker.”

Aubrey can’t breathe well, so he slides the window open, only it doesn’t help much.

They’re two hours into the journey, the kids robbing Kipp of all his money, when Aubrey excuses himself. He steps out into the corridor to breathe— to think—

They won’t find each other in the crowd later. This is it, and it’s wrong, it’s all wrong.

It’s all wrong, only there’s Easy, a window slid as far down as it’ll go, arms hanging out as he stares out at the fields. 

“I just wanted to breathe,” Easy says, because of course. “What about you?”

Aubrey joins him by the window and wishes he had at least a little of sun’s shamelessness: it’s already afternoon, and its rays are like bold fingers, the world bathed in light, there for the taking.

I’ll be holding my breath, he doesn’t say, till September.

They stand there in silence until the fields give way to a small town, and when the train starts pulling into a station, the change of pace knocks Aubrey into Easy like they’re bowling pins. It’s inevitable when they go down, only is it? Is it really? It catches him by surprise, it does, but Aubrey doesn’t actually try resisting the pull, and allows the world to make it happen: himself, crashing into Easy without bothering to grasp something for balance.

“Oh Christ,” Easy groans from underneath him once they land, sprawled on his back and massaging his forehead. Aubrey’s head is pillowed on his chest, their legs a tangle, the cotton of their shirts rubbing together.

“I’m sorry,” Aubrey says immediately, but fails to get up. “Are you hurt?”

“It’s almost like God doesn’t hate me after all,” Easy whispers, so quietly that Aubrey almost misses it, and maybe he’s heard wrong anyway, because where’s the sense in that? “You have something in your hair.”

“I do?” Aubrey mumbles, staring into Easy’s eyes.

“Why would I lie about it?” Easy says, arching an eyebrow.

“No, I just said it,” Aubrey says hurriedly. “Of course you wouldn’t lie about it.”

“How do you know I wouldn’t?” Easy asks, wry.

“Well, why would you?”

Easy tilts his head back with a sigh and – Aubrey tries his best not to feel disappointed about this – his fingers never end up finding their way into Aubrey’s hair. Aubrey pushes himself up, aware that it’s high time he moved, and God, why is the world like this? Why is depriving oneself like this the right thing to do?

(He was too warm, pressed against Easy, and when he gets up, the temperature is just right, which is to say, all wrong.)

Aubrey stares down at Easy and wonders why he feels like he's just committed a crime. Easy gets up before he can offer him a hand and smiles a crooked smile. “I’m sorry I’ve been weird,” he says, glancing out the window. “I’ll be normal in September.”

“Oh?”

Easy scowls at his half-reflection in the half-open window. “There’s something I don’t regret that I want gone anyway,” he explains, only it’s pretty lousy as explanations go.

“Well, good luck getting rid of it then,” Aubrey says clumsily, and the way Easy’s eyes snap to his at that—

“September,” Easy sighs, like a promise, and Aubrey, for whom September means only good things, assumes that whatever exorcism Easy is talking about must be a good thing, too.

Later, when he gets home, he remembers to check his reflection, and there’s nothing in his hair. There’s nothing in his hair, but it’s been hours—

There’s nothing in his hair.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading! <3 OHHH and a question, does anyone know if it's possible to post two parts of a series simultaneously, or do I have to complete one to move on to the next one? Because I'm sort of planning a whole separate part with the month characters' backstories only, as always, the part where I have to understand computers to do it is a challenge!


	9. dearest -- interlude, late winter 2005

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _What right do you have, J said before storming off a moment ago, to start letters with ‘dearest’?_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello everyone! Just a heads-up, this is super short! Part 3 itself is pretty short, I guess, but it was meant to be short, so that's a good thing. GOD I DID IT I FINISHED IT BEFORE NEW YEAR'S!!! (AND I FINISHED WRITING A BOOK TOO, WHAT EVEN???). Anyway, I can't wait to start posting year 4 (which will come with a bunch of warnings since year 4 is when shit hits the fan) and I can't wait to /finally/ start posting the month characters' backstories. Soon, you'll know everything. In the meantime, an early Happy New Year to you all (here's to 2021 being this century's redemption arc and not a disaster year like 2020) and thank you all so much for reading and for your support!! You guys have been awesome and I love you all <3 <3 <3

_~~Dearest~~ _

_What right do you have, J said before storming off a moment ago, to start letters with ‘dearest’?_

_She didn’t think it mattered that I crossed it out, or that I was never going to send the letter anyway. Well, you know what she’s like, or, at least, you did._

_But I don’t think you’d forget that, of all things, and she hasn’t changed much, like maybe she’s waiting for you to join us before she springs a brand new self on us._

_I’ve changed. I wonder if you’d like the changes. I have this list. It’s a list of all the unforgivable things I’ve done and I try to make up for them one by one, crossing them off once they’re taken care of. You’re the last item on the list not because you’re not a priority (you are, always, a priority), but because, of all the unforgivable things I’ve done, you’re the hardest to fix._

_(Not fix like you’re a faulty radio that needs a screwdriver or an upgrade. Fix like find you, and fix like make this better, not that it could be any worse.)_

_(Actually it being the worst it could possibly be is what saved me in the end, if you can believe the irony.)_

_I’m writing these because I have things to tell you, but I end up never saying them. I suppose it’s because you won’t read this. I suppose it’s because if you could read it, you probably wouldn’t because, say, do you still like burning things?_

_You never admitted it, but I think it broke your heart when we learned about WWII and how they’d burn piles of books. You’d already known it, but you sat there like you were re-learning it, and I could see that you’d love to unlearn it, and I could see that you wouldn’t unlearn it even if you were given the chance._

_I guess what I’m trying to say is that you were sad, and you were brave, and I wasn’t, but I’m trying to catch up. I swear, I’m trying to catch up, so_

_so let me?_

_P. S. I am still doing unforgivable things and I suppose that you’d see L being here as one of them but, funnily enough, I can’t wait for you to hate me for it. If you hated me for it, it’d mean you knowing about it, and if you knew about it, well. It’d mean you here._

_P. P. S. I no longer consult the dictionary when I want to check the meaning of a word: instead, I mull it over in the privacy of my own head until, whatever the word is, it inevitably leads me to thoughts of you. Did you know that the whole alphabet is for you? Did you know that the whole alphabet is about you?_

_P. P. P. S. When I sleep – and I do sleep, to make time pass faster, though sometimes I don’t sleep, to get to you sooner – sometimes, only sometimes, I dream of sheep._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for reading and see (see, for lack of a better word, anyway) you very soon! <3


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